ASTERRA helps build a more sustainable Earth by identifying and mitigating ‘lost water’ using AWS

Water is one of Earth’s most precious resources, yet a considerable amount goes missing worldwide every day. This lost water is typically referred to as nonrevenue water (NRW), and pipeline leaks are one of its main sources. Water pipeline leaks can damage critical infrastructure and put communities in danger, as well as lead to significant unplanned expenses and wasted resources. Two-thirds of countries have NRW rates above 30 percent, estimated at 346 million cubic meters globally per day. That’s equal to approximately 1.462 trillion glasses of water.

ASTERRA, an Israel-based geospatial and Earth observation company, uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help water utilities and a number of industries identify and mitigate pipeline leaks. ASTERRA uses AWS to derive intelligence and insights from beneath the surface of their largest installations and to bypass the need to break ground and dig for leaks. ASTERRA combines synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite imagery with patented algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) on AWS to help customers detect leaks, assess pipes, and locate moisture near major installations.

AWS has helped ASTERRA overcome traditional on-premises infrastructure limitations and to accelerate the development of solutions for anticipating and mitigating failures, saving water, energy, and avoiding carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions as a result.

Combining satellite imagery and AI in the cloud for a more sustainable future

Identifying and repairing water leaks helps municipalities reduce risk for human populations and the environment, and save money. Since 2017, ASTERRA has successfully verified more than 100,000 leaks, saving 368 billion gallons of water. By eliminating water pumping and processing resulting from leaks, ASTERRA has also helped save 920,000 megawatt hours (MWh) and avoid 235,520 metric tons of CO₂.

Traditionally, ASTERRA relied on its on-premises infrastructure to run leak detection solutions. As demand and usage grew, ASTERRA faced limitations when needing to process and manage increasingly large volumes of data efficiently and to provide timely and dependable results to their customers. To scale dynamically based on customer demand, ASTERRA migrated these workloads to AWS.

Now, ASTERRA uses AWS to host their satellite imagery processing pipeline and their EO Discover platform. EO Discover powers ASTERRA’s flagship solutions: MasterPlan for pipeline assessment, Recover for leak detection, and EarthWorks for infrastructure assessment.

Using data from L-band polarimetric SAR sensors, ASTERRA developed its Recover solution, which locates and analyzes moisture leaking from underground pipes for faster and less expensive repairs. Now, with ASTERRA Recover powered by AWS, entire city-wide systems for drinking water and wastewater can be monitored and analyzed. Even leaks that are nonsurfacing or have left no surface evidence at all are easily located. Ground crews can then be deployed with maximum efficiency, directly working on repairing the leaks that Recover has found rather than devoting time and effort digging in multiple places to find them.

Additionally, ASTERRA’s EarthWorks solution monitors actual moisture gathering below and around at-risk infrastructures to anticipate and mitigate failures before they occur. Examples include moisture in earthen embankment dams or levees whose integrity is crucial to prevent floods that could put communities in danger. The benefits of monitoring roads and railways are similar in terms of where water-caused damage could lead to potential harm.

“ASTERRA’s transition from lower-performance on-premises server computing to AWS has been a game-changer,” said Yuval Lorig, vice president of research and development for ASTERRA. “Our collaboration with AWS lets us access new levels of scalability, efficiency, agility, and performance. With AWS as our foundational support, we can dedicate our efforts to innovation and ensure the timely delivery of optimal solutions to our clients.”

Overcoming compute capacity constraints and unlocking innovation

ASTERRA stores large amounts of data, predominantly satellite imagery, in a secure, cost-optimized and durable way using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). ASTERRA recently re-architected their satellite imagery processing pipeline to use Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a managed service that helps run Kubernetes clusters at scale and minimizes operational effort by providing a fully managed, highly available, and scalable Kubernetes control plane running across multiple AWS Availability Zones.

By relying on managed services, ASTERRA can reduce the operational overhead and focus on their innovation efforts. As an example, the company chose AWS Elastic Beanstalk to deploy EO Discover. Elastic Beanstalk allows developers to quickly deploy and manage applications in the AWS Cloud. Developers upload their application, and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto scaling, and application health monitoring.

ASTERRA EO Discover uses AWS to help empower organizations like water infrastructure companies, government agencies, and water utilities with actionable intelligence that enables informed decision-making. For example, ASTERRA EO Discover uses AWS to enable insights that align organizations’ key performance indicators (KPIs) and return on investment (ROI) analyses with mission objectives for boots-on-the-ground teams, operations managers, and decision-makers. The platform also integrates metrics that help organizations evaluate their impact and implement strategies in alignment with United Nations Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs). This enables ASTERRA customers to make informed decisions and contribute to a more sustainable future on Earth.

Figure 1: Screenshot of the ASTERRA EO Discover platform. This example shows a dashboard of KPIs and current status on water leaks.

Scalable solutions and ever-increasing positive impact

AWS helps ASTERRA run their workloads with the scalability and efficiency that their business requires. As a result, ASTERRA now supports more than 600 customers in 64 countries. In 2022, ASTERRA was awarded the Geospatial World Forum Excellence Award, which recognizes exemplary use of geospatial tools and solutions, and the Better Satellite World Award from Space and Satellite Professionals International, which recognizes technologies that contribute to increased global prosperity, health, education, sustainability, and inclusivity.

Powered by AWS, ASTERRA is making significant contributions towards a more sustainable Earth. Harnessing the power of satellite imagery–based infrastructure intelligence with AWS, ASTERRA not only revolutionizes how organizations track and manage their environmental impact, but they are also making significant strides towards achieving a more sustainable and resilient future for all.

Learn more about AWS for aerospace and satellite

Organizations of all sizes across all industries are transforming and delivering on their aerospace and satellite missions every day using AWS. Learn more about the cloud for aerospace and satellite solutions so you can start your own AWS Cloud journey today.

Get inspired. Watch our AWS in Space story.

Read more about AWS for aerospace and satellite:

• Amazon and AWS to reimagine space station operations and logistics for Orbital Reef
• AWS in Orbit Ep1: Safe railways, healthy forests with LiveEO
• AWS in Orbit Ep2: Closing the digital divide with Kacific
• AWS in Orbit podcast: Leveraging generative AI to do more at the rugged space edge with AWS
• AWS selects 13 startups for the 2023 Space Accelerator
• Managing the world’s natural resources with earth observation
• AWS joins the Digital IF Interoperability (DIFI) Consortium
• How Natural Resources Canada migrated petabytes of geospatial data to the cloud