Category: Aerospace & Satellite

Earlier this week, I was thrilled to host my first AWS Public Sector Partner Forum in advance of the AWS Summit Washington, DC. It was a wonderful opportunity to speak directly to AWS Partners about our journey together, share some exciting announcements, and have a conversation with other AWS leaders. Here are some highlights.

AWS helps customers build satellites, conduct space and launch operations, and leverage cloud-powered infrastructure on the ground. To further promote scalability and flexibility across the space industry, AWS has joined the Digital IF Interoperability (DIFI) Consortium. The DIFI Consortium is an independent group of space companies, organizations, and government agencies from around the world that promote an open and simple standard to facilitate interoperability of ground systems supporting space operations.

AWS is pleased to officially announce the selection of the 10 participants for the 2022 AWS Space Accelerator. The selected startups each have an inspiring and innovative vision for how to transform the growing global space industry across a diverse set of mission areas, including Earth observation (EO), space situational awareness, launch and propulsion, and space exploration.

On May 23-25, 2022, AWS will hold the AWS Summit Washington, DC at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC. The no cost, three-day event will include more than 300 breakout sessions, chalk talks, customer lightning talks, builders’ sessions, and more, with a focus on how to accelerate innovation in the public sector. If you’re planning on attending, or thinking about attending, here’s how you can make the most of your AWS Summit Washington, DC experience.

As the number of spacecraft and spacecraft missions accelerates, moving aerospace and satellite operations to the cloud via digital transformation — including virtualizing the ground segment — is key for economic viability. In this blog post, we explain the benefits of virtualizing the ground segment in the cloud and present the core components of a reference architecture that uses AWS to support several stages of a comprehensive ground segment virtualization. Then, working from this model, we present additional reference architectures for virtualizing the ground segment that can accommodate various requirements and usage scenarios.

Bangalore International Airport Limited (BIAL), operator of Kempegowda International Airport, Bengaluru (BLR Airport), announced it will establish a Joint Innovation Center (JIC) with AWS and Intel to drive the development and adoption of digital solutions in aviation. This is the first JIC dedicated to advancing the aviation industry.

Since 1971, Canada Centre for Mapping and Earth Observation (CCMEO) at Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) has accumulated an Earth observation (EO) data archive in excess of two petabytes (PB). NRCan wanted to modernize its geospatial offerings at a faster pace, so they turned to the AWS Snow Family on AWS to migrate their large volume of data.

Vandenberg Space Force Base (VSFB), also known as the Western Launch and Test Range, is one of only two U.S. Space Force launch ranges. A safe rocket launch relies on the ability of Western Range meteorologists to gather and analyze weather data in real-time. The Western Range team wanted to switch to an agile, cloud-based solution that would streamline data analysis and keep operators safe—which prompted them to call on students and AWS Cloud experts at the California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) Digital Transformation Hub (DxHub), powered by AWS, to help VSFB prototype a solution.

Geospatial datasets are increasingly large, reaching terabyte and even petabyte scale, which can cause many challenges for geospatial analysts and educators–but Amazon AppStream 2.0 can provide some solutions. In this blog post, we walk through how to deploy QGIS, a no cost, open-source geospatial information system (GIS) application used by geospatial analysts, in Amazon AppStream 2.0. We also load an example dataset to demonstrate how desktop GIS application users can access large, cloud-hosted geospatial datasets with high performance by keeping the data and compute components together on the cloud, and streaming the desktop application instead of downloading the data itself.

How will humans explore, experiment, and sustain long-term habitation in low Earth orbit (LEO)? Orbital Reef is the next generation space station currently in development to provide commercial and research space activities in LEO, as well as space tourism capabilities. Amazon Distribution and Fulfillment Solutions (Amazon) and AWS are helping Orbital Reef reimagine networking, logistics, and communications that will be an integral part of the next space station.