AWS’ Teresa Carlson: NASA, Tech Companies Leverage Cloud to Explore Space

Teresa Carlson, vice president of the worldwide public sector at Amazon Web Services and a 2020 Wash100 awardee, wrote in a blog entry posted Monday how cloud platforms help NASA and space technology companies explore space, protect life on Earth and support other missions.

Carlson discussed how NASA has studied the conditions associated with superstorms through its collaboration with the Amazon Machine Learning Solutions Lab and AWS Professional Services.

“With the power and speed of AWS, analyses to predict superstorms can be carried out by sifting through as many as 1,000 datasets at a time,” she wrote. “To date, the initiative has aggregated observational data from 50+ satellite missions containing images, time-series, and miscellaneous telemetry data.”

Carlson cited how Maxar Technologies, which plans to launch its WorldView Legion satellite constellation in 2021, uses the cloud to downlink and process satellite data and space imagery and support other space exploration missions.

“By using AWS Cloud storage, artificial intelligence, and ML services, Maxar extracts actionable, Earth intelligence from the imagery for its customers when and where it matters most,” she added.