Session
Session 5: Ground
Abstract
The space industry is in the midst of technological upheaval involving the proliferation of small satellites and the commercialization of cloud computing as a service. The proliferation of small satellites is made possible by cube sat standards, normalized small satellites launch vehicles, and continued miniaturization of electronics. The small satellite revolution has created new business, science and defense based opportunities resulting in new proposals for sizeable small satellite constellations. Similarly cloud computing as a service, has made possible the advent of high performance computing platforms and the emergence of commodity virtual machine technology. Hundreds of cloud computing service providers have emerged including Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, and HP.
At the convergence of these two technological upheavals is an opportunity, perhaps even a mandate, to transition traditional satellite group processing from dedicated operations centers to cloud computing centers. By utilizing virtual machine technology, Kratos has hosted a software based ground system with a significantly smaller footprint than traditional ground systems. While this is a step in the right direction and works well for a single satellite or small constellation, the reality is a 1,000 constellation of small satellites is very possible in today’s industry and traditional ground processing resources may not be viable solutions.
As a research initiative, Kratos used Amazon cloud computing services to simulate the deployment and operations of a large fleet operations center capable of supporting 1,000 spacecraft with 30 simultaneous contacts and 100 users. This paper will discuss the findings and results of this research and provide an overview of the commercial cloud computing state of the industry including costs, capabilities, and service contracts with their applicability towards satellite constellation operations. It will also discuss the architectural considerations for using cloud computing technology to include Virtual Machine (VM) technology, software tuning considerations, deployment consideration, and security implications.
Presentation
Flying Constellations in the Cloud
The space industry is in the midst of technological upheaval involving the proliferation of small satellites and the commercialization of cloud computing as a service. The proliferation of small satellites is made possible by cube sat standards, normalized small satellites launch vehicles, and continued miniaturization of electronics. The small satellite revolution has created new business, science and defense based opportunities resulting in new proposals for sizeable small satellite constellations. Similarly cloud computing as a service, has made possible the advent of high performance computing platforms and the emergence of commodity virtual machine technology. Hundreds of cloud computing service providers have emerged including Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, and HP.
At the convergence of these two technological upheavals is an opportunity, perhaps even a mandate, to transition traditional satellite group processing from dedicated operations centers to cloud computing centers. By utilizing virtual machine technology, Kratos has hosted a software based ground system with a significantly smaller footprint than traditional ground systems. While this is a step in the right direction and works well for a single satellite or small constellation, the reality is a 1,000 constellation of small satellites is very possible in today’s industry and traditional ground processing resources may not be viable solutions.
As a research initiative, Kratos used Amazon cloud computing services to simulate the deployment and operations of a large fleet operations center capable of supporting 1,000 spacecraft with 30 simultaneous contacts and 100 users. This paper will discuss the findings and results of this research and provide an overview of the commercial cloud computing state of the industry including costs, capabilities, and service contracts with their applicability towards satellite constellation operations. It will also discuss the architectural considerations for using cloud computing technology to include Virtual Machine (VM) technology, software tuning considerations, deployment consideration, and security implications.
