Raytheon, NASA Build Cloud Platform to Store Sentinel-6 Satellite Data; David Appel Quoted

Raytheon Technologies’ intelligence and space business has worked with NASA to develop a cloud-based platform meant to help the agency distribute and archive data from the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich climate monitoring satellite. 

The company said Tuesday scientists can access insights and data collected by Sentinel-6 through the Earthdata Cloud platform, which was developed under NASA’s Earth Science Data and Information Systems project.

“NASA is required to keep all data in perpetuity,” said David Appel, vice president of defense and civil solutions at Raytheon Intelligence and Space. “The data storage challenge becomes that much greater with the petabytes upon petabytes of data that satellites generate every day.” 

The RI&S team also collaborated with the Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center Operation of the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to transmit satellite data to the cloud through the Cumulus application that receives, manages and distributes space-derived data. 

The company said NASA intends to provide the public access to Sentinel-6 data by September through the use of cloud-based application programming interfaces.

The Potomac Officers Club will hold the 2021 Industrial Space Defense Summit on March 23 to feature discussions on space technology, partnerships and innovation. To register for this virtual summit and view other upcoming events, visit the Potomac Officers Club Events page.