EDGE COMPUTING & MICRO DATACENTERS IN SPACE

In the last decade, low-cost reusable rocket technology has completely disrupted the projections of space industrialization, initiating an unprecedented gold rush in space entrepreneurship. Getting satellites into space is getting cheaper and easier by the day. 

While conversations about moon bases and colonization of Mars are fun, the most “grounded” strategies are focusing on delivering Low Earth Orbit satellites to improve weather forecasting, communications, imagery and Internet Access.  

The challenge is keeping up with the growing bottleneck of sending satellite data back to earth, then processing it in the traditional cloud.  Companies, including Amazon, have recognized this challenge, building ground stations to process data, so customers can quickly strip out noise, turning raw data into actionable intelligence.   

What if you could process the data at the “Orbits Edge”?

For cloud computing on Earth, the initial problems were processing capacity and data security. With the maturation of the Cloud, these problems have been resolved.  Now latency and bandwidth are the most common challenges.

The Orbital Data Bottleneck encounters similar patterns: processing power, memory capacity, with bandwidth and latency being the most severe. 

While Low Earth Orbit provides the best case scenario for satellite-Earth latency because of its proximity, there is also the future of data growth itself. 

It is acknowledged that the terrestrial Cloud is constantly racing against increases in data and processing.

Edge resources offload the collection and processing of data and minimizes the amount sent to the Cloud. 

OrbitsEdge is extending Edge resources Above-the-Cloud™ to offload data and analytics, minimizing bandwidth requirements and lowering latency of transmission. 

And then there's the orbital customer: Satellite operators. 

Along with the growth of data, a remarkable increase in the number of satellites (such as Cubesats) are being launched with thousands planned in the following years. Being small, many may lack the processing and memory options that the SatFrame™ 445 LE will provide, creating an Above-the-Cloud™ web service for data processing and analytics for satellites unable to meet the demands themselves.