An image captured by the ION Elysian Eleonara satellite in January 2022.
D-Orbit
Amazon’s cloud computing division successfully ran a software suite on a satellite in orbit, in a “first-of-its-kind” experiment, the company announced Tuesday.
AWS, or Amazon Web Services, conducted the prototype satellite software demonstration through partnerships with Italian company D-Orbit and Swedish venture Unibap. The experiment was conducted over the past 10 months in low Earth orbit, using a D-Orbit satellite as the test platform.
The success of the AWS demo has implications across the space industry, as spacecraft – meaning anything from space stations to satellites – face a bottleneck in both data storage and communications while in orbit.
A “downlink,” the process of transferring data from orbit, requires a spacecraft connect to a ground station, with limitations such as the speed of the…
