[New Wave] Cloud Technology Behind Mars Exploration Robot

On the 19th of last month, a new robot arrived on Mars. NASA's mobile exploration robot, Perseverance, departed Earth on July 30th last year and landed on Mars after flying a total of 470 million kilometers over six and a half months. It is the fifth rover following Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity (2004), and Curiosity (2011), which were the first American rovers to reach Mars in 1997.

The storage that receives hundreds of high-resolution photos sent daily from Perseverance on Mars is located in the cloud. During the robot's mission period, scientific data such as atmospheric information, wind speed, and weather from various sensors benefit from the scalability, agility, and reliability provided by the cloud. It also detects sounds on Mars through a high-performance microphone. These data are processed by NASA and released as open data on the cloud.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which operates the rover, uses analytics technology within the cloud to make faster decisions about the rover's health and safety every day. This analytical information is used by scientists and engineers to drive the rover the next day. It is necessary to analyze data about the surrounding environment, travel distance, and obstacles to send new movement instructions to the rover. Thanks to this, the Mars 2020 project has been able to achieve its goal of collecting more samples and traveling farther distances during its primary mission compared to previous explorers.

The secret behind NASA's ability to live stream the rover's Mars landing scene to the general public also lies in the cloud. The website hosted on the cloud can handle millions of simultaneous users during peak times. The public can track the Mars rover's location on the JPL website and experience the planet in 3D through high-resolution images taken by multiple cameras, as if they were actually on Mars.

The cloud is also having a significant impact on future space industries such as satellite control and space internet. AWS Ground Station service allows users to rent satellite ground station services on-demand (responding immediately to consumer demand). Without the need to build or operate ground infrastructure, users only pay for communication by the minute, which is utilized by companies and governments operating satellites, as well as universities using ultra-lightweight satellites like CubeSats. By leveraging ground stations worldwide, weather data and satellite images can be received and analyzed within the cloud.

Thanks to the scalability of the cloud, the space industry continues to advance. Examples include Capella Space, which provides Earth observation data through 36 satellites even in bad weather or low-light conditions, and The Orbit, a space transportation service company operating the space freighter Ion CubeSat carrier. They conduct CubeSat ground control services and space logistics businesses based on the cloud. The fact that the space industry must actively utilize the cloud marks an era that leaves many implications for those of us challenging space.

Seokchan Yoon, Senior Tech Evangelist at AWS