Space Smurfs: S02E08

CLOUD COMPUTING IN SPACE

What is cloud computing?

We’ve all heard the term ‘cloud computing' or ‘cloud storage’ in our day-to-day life. However, what does it exactly mean? As a kid, I imagined people sitting on clouds with their computers, but obviously (and sadly), that is not what cloud computing means.

To simply put it, cloud computing is the delivery of different services via the internet. You can access your apps and services and store your data securely somewhere at the end of your internet connection, where it is hosted on your cloud provider’s servers.

Credits: Brainware University

The major advantage is that you can access and process data anytime, anywhere, and on any device.

Most of the time, we all use the concept of cloud computing without our knowledge. It’s utilised in location services, streaming sites like Netflix and Amazon Prime, stock markets and finance, and virtually almost everything we use the internet for.

It has helped in the growth of businesses because of the ‘pay for what you use’ model, which bridges the gap between small companies and huge corporations that can afford costly IT hardware.

Cloud computing and Space

In space, data is the most valuable asset. Satellites and spacecraft generate enormous amounts of data, from which we gain priceless insights that help in our everyday life, as well as in disaster management.

We use satellites for many things such as communication, earth observation, reconnaissance, etc. Millions of people around the globe avail such services. All this leads to a massive amount of data being transferred to different locations in a fraction of a second. When you think about it, it almost seems wondrous and impossible. In the 70s, we couldn’t even fathom a data size of 1 TB, yet with the advent of cloud computing, we’ve broken barriers and have got a huge capacity for data processing and transfer.

Applications

Let’s consider a case of real-time flood monitoring.

We obviously use data from satellite constellations, that are downlinked as high-resolution images continuously. This consumes a lot of space if we try to store it somewhere, so to process such data in real-time, we use the ‘cloud’. As the images are being received to ground stations, machine learning algorithms (ML) and AI are deployed to check if there are any discrepancies when compared to the reference.

Thus, even if there is a slight change in water levels or any other indicator of a flood, we are notified immediately, thereby enabling us to save countless lives and resources.

This is just one example. Cloud services like AWS (Amazon Web Service) can be used for monitoring wildfires, weather, water levels, climate change, providing uninterrupted communication between different locations, and much more.

While all these applications involve space, it is targeted toward consumers on Earth, i.e., it is Earth-based. What about the in-space uses?

This is where edge computing comes into play. It’s a technique that allows the data to be processed in the same place where it was collected, instead of being sent to a central server and then sent back.

This is extremely beneficial if we think on a grand scale of things, such as Mars colonisation or even sending probes to other planets. In the short term, even satellites in orbit can use this along with a cloud network to deliver faster data rates.

Satellite deployed from ISS. Credits: NASA

?Imagine the ISS itself. There are a lot of experiments being conducted there and the raw data is sent back to Earth for processing, instead, it could be processed in the International Space Station itself in order to expedite the research.

Cloud computing is extremely vital for space exploration since it can quickly access, study and read data over a server that is shared. It is possible in the long term to have a ‘space cloud’ that connects, let’s say, devices on the Moon, Earth’s orbit, Mars, and a probe orbiting around Saturn, however, one tangible problem that needs to be solved is the communication delay over huge physical distances.

One short-term, in-space application is the monitoring of space debris. We can use existing satellites having imaging sensors to observe other decommissioned or old satellites and micrometeoroids. By using cloud computing services, we can keep a track of the location of the debris, the velocity at which it is traveling, etc.

There are a lot of other applications and start-ups are booming by creating specialized solutions that use both space technology and cloud services.

With the exponential growth of technology such as cloud computing, we have the capability to process ginormous data in a jiffy and have it at our fingertips! The future certainly seems exciting and maybe we can even make calls to someone on Mars!