How imagine a AWS 2018 planning meeting: Shall we fix the NLB healthchecks or do something cool like with satellites and shit?
plz fix you current shit AWS instead of introducing new shit every week
AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites
151–160 of 171 posts
Re: AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh. Space is just a place that's annoying to ship to. (With the one key advantage of having line-of-sight to arbitrary deployed IoT devices.) "Underwater", meanwhile, is more of a mode of operation / design for data centers, with the goal of that simplifying (and decreasing costs for) cooling. An underwater data center doesn't imply that the data center is actually off-shore to any large degree. I'd imagine they'd lo…
This will accelerate global warming and kill off fragile ecosystems from all the heat being radiated to the oceans.
Not likely, water is a good heat conductor so there will just be a area of slightly warmer water near the outlet. You might get a micro ecology with some tropical fish far from their normal grounds but nothing dramatic will happen.
It'll certainly not be worse for the environment than any normal data centre, unless it springs a leak and something toxic escapes.
Re: AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You might like ... Fog Computing [0]?
Re: AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is my research area! (JPL)
How different is a commercial setup compared to running a pi with rtlsdr and a homebrew helix antenna?
A ground station is going to involve some RF equipment first: an LNA to boost the received signal then that feeds into a down convertor to bring it to 1200MHz typically. The 1200MHz signal goes into a modem which can either be something very specific (think satellite TV set top box) or something very capable (think big server with a custom ADC capture card in the back). The modem will do some forward error correction. FEC can involve a mix of Reed-Soloman, Viterbi, and LDPC. The bits can now be sent out over a network connection. Uplink involves basically the reverse process except there is usually no FEC since you can always boost your ground antenna to be much more powerful than the one in space. An exception to that would be uplink signals meant to be relayed to the ground. More of those "bent pipe" satellites are becoming digital which allows them to process signals and make them smarter about channel utilization.
All of this equipment can usually fit within a rack or two. The downlink stuff can fit within a few U. Uplink involves some big power amplifiers. Back in the 60s it would have involved dozens of racks of equipment.
Re: AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
In simple terms space it not chilly but vacuum, so the heat can't go anywhere.
It's not that heat can't go anywhere, it's that there's nothing to carry heat away. On Earth, air molecules can carry heat away from you. You transfer heat to the air around you. In space, there is almost no matter around you to absorb the heat and carry it away from you. Your only option is to radiate heat away from you in the form of infrared light but that is a slow process.
> It's not that heat can't go anywhere, it's that there's nothing to carry heat away
So ... the heat stays put and doesn’t go anywhere?
Re: AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites
#156Sounds like this was built for DigitalGlobe (announced last year they are going all in on AWS and moved ~100PB library into AWS). Satellite directly to S3 sounds perfect for them.
Yeah, they posted this on their blog today: http://blog.digitalglobe.com/industry/sending-data-from-spac...
Impressive! Image capture to s3 in 55 seconds!
Re: AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not that heat can't go anywhere, it's that there's nothing to carry heat away. On Earth, air molecules can carry heat away from you. You transfer heat to the air around you. In space, there is almost no matter around you to absorb the heat and carry it away from you. Your only option is to radiate heat away from you in the form of infrared light but that is a slow process.
> It's not that heat can't go anywhere, it's that there's nothing to carry heat away So ... the heat stays put and doesn’t go anywhere?
It doesn't go anywhere except by radiation, which sucks as a way to cool things compared to conduction.
Re: AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm the CEO of Descartes Labs. It's indeed true that we've built a data refinery that ingests lots and lots of satellite data. The data refinery can be seen as a two-sided marketplace. On one side, we form partnerships with satellite and other geospatial data companies (in addition to open source data from NASA, ESA,and others) and pull in all of that data. On the other side, scientists can run computations over huge…
Can you give an example of "refined" data versus what one might get through the AWS product? ... in order to demonstrate the sort of tech skills and effort that differentiate the two. I'm basically hoping for some symbol grounding for "data refinery". Also, what's the TAM in your specific market vs the AWS product's market? How has the TAM changed in the past 5 years? Lastly, I heard your head of engineering brews be…
Refined data probably means getting insights from the vast amount of aerial imagery (and related like SAR or elevation model) data that has become available in recent years. Having access to the data is one thing (e.g. Landsat and Sentinel provided by Google, Amazon and other parties), but processing it efficiently is still non-trivial.
Examples include Land-Cover-Mapping (mapping pixels to classes like forests, urban areas, water, etc.) which can then further be used to do crop monitoring or land-use monitoring.
I guess this is different than the product AWS is offering here, which is more about getting the data from/to the satellite, but not about processing (at least for now).
Re: AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites
#159Earlier 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.
the RF signal that the antenna receives is affected by a number of environmental factors as it travels from the satellite to the antenna.
Re: AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites
#160Earlier 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.
CDN on Starlink sorta makes sense
My first thought was DNS cache.