Bigdata driving Space Explorations

Is Earth the only planet inhabited by millions of species? Are we alone in this entire universe? Is life sustainable in other planets and exoplanets? These are some of the burning questions still debated till date and we don't have a definite answer to it. As per stats Earth supports 8.7 million of species out of which 6.5 million species are on land and 2.2 million are in oceans. As technology is getting advanced and sophisticated, mankind is stepping it's footsteps outside the four walls and exploring the space around for industrialization and colonization. Numerous probes and rovers had been sent to nearby planets and asteroids collecting data in the form of readings, photographs including 3D and multispectral images & video which is a massive chunk of #bigdata transmitted back via radio frequency to the base stations at Earth which is relatively a slow approach.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) had been doing this for ages. Each satellite captures and transmits back the data about our planet and the entire Universe per second. Deep space craft send back data in the order of MB per second while Earth Orbiters send back data in the order of GB per second. Current missions are planning to transmit the data in the order of 24TB per day.

For instance NASA’s Mars rovers which included the first generation rover Viking 1 lander which operated for 2245 sols till the latest Mars Exploration Rovers (Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity) breaking the previous record of Viking 1 with 5220 sols from Opportunity rover alone. Curiosity rover uploads tens of thousands of data points including every reading it ever took through its sensors such as temperature on Martian Surface, atmospheric pressure and accurate data on the rover’s equipment and tools.

Handling humongous data with variety of data points is an issue for a space organization like NASA. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory built an analytics solution around Elasticsearch which is used by Netflix and Goldman Sachs for real time feedback to respond quickly to rover’s environment and change it’s operations. Also the rate of malfunctions and failure can be identified and greatly reduced since correlations can provide insights which leads to greater possibility of success. The New Horizon spacecraft flew past Pluto, a dwarf planet transmitted around 6.25 GB of data

Soil Moisture Active Passive project uses Elasticsearch which detects the level of moisture and captures the high resolution data for analysis. It’s currently deployed to capture the details of our planet providing the deep insights of the level of moisture content in the soil. With advanced sensors and technology Curiosity was able to detect the levels of organic molecules and methane in Mars' air. NASA plans to land a rover by 2020 deployed with life detecting equipment which would be fast in handling and processing data. Technologies like Elasticsearch would prove beneficial in this regard.

Square Kilometer Array [SKA] Project is an array of 36 antennas spread across 4000 square metres situated across the world to find the potential answers and mysteries of the universe. Around 700TB/sec of data flows from SKA. NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) is a virtual laboratory visualising large Earth data science projects. The same could be used in visualising interplanetary atmospheres.

Conclusion

With the help of visualizations and analysis, #bigdata would lead to identify earth sized planets within and outside the solar system, life sustainability by analyzing the climatic conditions of the planet and elements constituent in an asteroid for mining purpose. As Michio Kaku rightly said that we are still in Type 0 in the Kardashev Scale,

1. Type 0 - Current state
2. Type I - Planetary civilization ( Interplanetary colonizations & planetary and cosmic objects mining)
3. Type II - Stellar civilization ( harnessing energy from the stars, e.g. Dyson Sphere)
4. Type III - Galactic civilization (controlling the energy of the entire galaxy)

With detailed analysis of the volume, veracity and velocity of the data being gathered every second, humanity could finally be ranked in Type I in the scale.