AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites • Hacker News Board

Re: AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites

#141

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 8:40 AM UTC

Rebelgecko wrote: post #104

tzakrajs wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of intelligence data there is. Read up on ITAR and EAR. So you don’t think that the satellites AWS will interface with will be facing earth with sensors?

ITAR is pretty limited in what it considers intelligence/military. Unless you're looking for missile launches or doing remote sensing with technologies that are better than what's available to the general public, it probably won't apply. There's plenty of interesting things you can do without running afoul of ITAR/USML definitions. Some telemetry and sensor data may be EAR99, which is as far as export restrictions go…

[deleted]

Re: AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites

#142

Post by z3phyr » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 8:41 AM UTC

MegaDeKay wrote: post #127

liotier wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering the difficulty of dumping heat in a vacuum and the cost of orbiting huge heat exchangers, I wager that heavy computing shall remain a mostly planetary activity for quite a while longer.

Heat is a problem, but I think it is safe to say that power is a bigger one. Those big arrays are really expensive, really heavy, degrade in output over time, and have been known to fail on occasion. [0][1] [0] https://spacenews.com/33046spate-of-solar-array-failures-on-... [1] https://sat-nd.com/failures/index.html?https://sat-nd.com/fa...

Radiation is another issue. I have heard that radiation hardening is very costly

Re: AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites

#143

Post by Tepix » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 9:13 AM UTC

People with cubesats or interested and willing to help should look into SatNOGS. Running your own ground station is cheap (a $250 investment).

https://satnogs.org/

Re: AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites

#144

Post by andyjohnson0 » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 9:20 AM UTC

garmaine wrote: post #114

batbomb wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NASA telescopes used to be governed by ITAR. They've relaxed those a lot, but you had to use software to transmit the data encrypted all the way to your science pipelines (e.g. Telescope to White Sands to Goddard to $INSTITUTION)

That’s because they’re telescopes. NASA’s telescopes are basically spy satellites pointed outwards.

> NASA’s telescopes are basically spy satellites pointed outwards.

Literally in at least one case. The NRA donated two surveillance satellites to NASA back in 2012 [1] and the plan is to fly one of them as the WFIRST telescope [2]. I don't think there is a launch date yet.

[1] https://www.space.com/16000-spy-satellites-space-telescopes-...

[2] https://spaceflightnow.com/2016/02/18/nasa-moves-forward-wit...

Re: AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites

#145

Post by dzhiurgis » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 10:23 AM UTC

liotier wrote: post #47

jeletonskelly wrote: post #16

Imagine Amazon building and launching satellites like space based data centers. AWS in orbit. You could provision VMs on a satellite equipped with an array of general sensors, cameras, etc.

Considering the difficulty of dumping heat in a vacuum and the cost of orbiting huge heat exchangers, I wager that heavy computing shall remain a mostly planetary activity for quite a while longer.

CDN on Starlink sorta makes sense

Re: AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites

#146

Post by _Microft » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 10:58 AM UTC

jeletonskelly wrote: post #16

Imagine Amazon building and launching satellites like space based data centers. AWS in orbit. You could provision VMs on a satellite equipped with an array of general sensors, cameras, etc.

What problem does this solve?

Re: AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites

#147

Post by SiempreViernes » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 11:03 AM UTC

resters wrote: post #122

itronitron wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it depends a lot on how much control they allow the offeree over the antenna, ground station configuration, and signal processing. Anyone that cares about the data quality they are getting from their satellites is not going to trust a 3rd party solution.

> Anyone that cares about the data quality they are getting from their satellites is not going to trust a 3rd party solution. Please explain this, I don't understand why it would be the case.

People that record music professionally don't buy an android phone and settle for that because of the severe restrictions on the hardware optimisation it imposes.

Likewise, people that are concerned about optimising the radio link are not likely to accept restrictions in the receiver design for instance.

Re: AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites

#148

Post by aiCeivi9 » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 11:05 AM UTC

imhoguy wrote: post #131

deckarep wrote: post #24

I think there’s going to be an API for everything renissance and this is just another example. As a coder being able to automate all the things and create new businesses, processes, workflows it’s a great time to be a coder. Aka reaching beyond the cloud.

Great until they release "AWS Coder" - Coder as a Service offering, likely some AI stuff ;)

https://www.mturk.com/ is already a bit scary.

Re: AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites

#149

Post by SiempreViernes » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 11:07 AM UTC

_Microft wrote: post #146

jeletonskelly wrote: post #16

Imagine Amazon building and launching satellites like space based data centers. AWS in orbit. You could provision VMs on a satellite equipped with an array of general sensors, cameras, etc.

What problem does this solve?

It would finally put the cloud in the sky! Marketing will be ecstatic over all the sky based puns they'll be allowed.

Also, I guess it would solve the problem of it being expensive to put things in space by virtue of somehow having made someone else pay for vast overcapacity of sensors.

Re: AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites

#150

Post by SiempreViernes » Wed, Nov 28, 2018, 11:10 AM UTC

kodablah wrote: post #73

mikepurvis wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really cost effective to roll your own for that kind of thing? I would have thought there were enough off the shelf satellite/m2m solutions for remote connectivity, eg https://www.orbcomm.com/en/networks/satellite

> Is it really cost effective to roll your own for that kind of thing? Nope, hence leveraging Amazon et al. I would consider the AWS "above the cloud" offering (as I've now dubbed it) to essentially be the same commoditized thing as what you linked. An extraterrestrial CDN with edge compute if you will.

Clearly this is a case of "cloud in the sky"