By GCN Staff
May 25, 2021
Recent demonstrations have shown that commercial cloud computing can be used to process and securely deliver actionable information from low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites to military ground stations, command centers or direct to warfighters on the battlefield.
As part of the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center's Commercially Augmented Space Inter Networked Operations program, Microsoft and Ball Aerospace demonstrated that data and images from distributed constellations of LEO satellites could be quickly processed, analyzed and distributed using Microsoft's Azure cloud and Ball Aerospace‘s imagery exploitation algorithms.
For the demonstrations, simulated infrared data was pushed from Telesat satellites to a Microsoft Azure cloud data center, where it was processed using Ball’s event-driven architecture and then distributed to multiple end points, officials said in a press statement. In the final demonstration showing that satellite data could be transmitted directly to warfighters, data was downlinked direct from Telesat’s network of LEO satellites to a Ball-built phased array antenna attached to a tactical vehicle equipped with an Azure Stack Edge device.