NASA, ESA tap AWS to trial cloud tech for faster satellite data transfers

January 23, 2025 10:46 AM

Silhouettes of satellite dishes/space observatory/radio antennas against the night sky

NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) are working to transform data transmissions back to Earth, leveraging cloud technology to speed up downlink times.

In collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), the agencies successfully trialled transmitting data streams from ground stations to cloud servers.

The tests, conducted last October, were conducted in preparation for data coming back from the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is expected to downlink 500 megabits per second (Mb/s) in 2026 — six times more than the ESA’s Euclid mission’s 75 Mb/s.

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Current space-faring telescopes don’t make use of cloud facilities. Instead, once downlinked, the gathered data files are reconstructed at each ground station and then transferred centrally.

Bringing in AWS, the space agencies are instead looking to simplify the data transmission by demodulating signals at ground stations, decoding the data, storing the telemetry in files, and uploading them to the nearest AWS server.

“The test performed at European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) went successfully,” Holger Dreihahn, head of the backend software section at ESOC, explained in a blog post. “We managed to handle our share of data and transfer them of AWS servers. At the other end of the process, NASA handled the files within the Cloud and reconstructed them successfully.

“As expected, for the moment, our connectivity does not match Roman’s expected 500 Mb/s data rate. We are currently ongoing works to increase our speed from 200Mbit/s to 500Mbits/s and more.”

By transmitting data directly to cloud servers, the process being trialled by the space agencies could greatly speed up data transfers from satellites, enabling end users to access data in near real-time without having to wait for centralised processing.

Cloud-based solutions are already being used by NASA to share Earth observation data, with the ESA planning to explore using it to store other types of telemetry data.

“This activity is a first step towards setting up a more cloud-based environment for ESA's operations,” said Dreihahn. “As a spillover of our work on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, we aim at generalising the approach to provide a standardised solution to future missions.”

To support the concept, the ESA built a 35-metre antenna in New Norcia, Australia to support downlink speedups. The antenna is expected to be completed in the second half of 2025.