Amazon’s cloud computing division successfully ran a software suite on a satellite in orbit, in a “first-of-its-kind” experiment, the company announced Tuesday.
AWS, or Amazon Web Services, conducted the prototype satellite software demonstration through partnerships with Italian company D-Orbit and Swedish venture Unibap. The experiment was conducted over the past 10 months in low Earth orbit, using a D-Orbit satellite as the test platform.
The success of the AWS demo has implications across the space industry, as spacecraft – meaning anything from space stations to satellites – face a bottleneck in both data storage and communications while in orbit.
KEY POINTS
- Amazon's cloud computing division successfully ran a software suite on a satellite in orbit, the company announced Tuesday.
- AWS, or Amazon Web Services, used prototype software on a satellite to analyze imagery.
- The software automatically reviewed images to decide which were the most useful to send back down to the ground, and also reduced the size of images.
News coverage:
https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2022/11/30/aws_powers_earth_observation_satellite/
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/29/amazon-aws-experiment-satellite-orbit.html
