- 25 million viewers watch the first-ever 4K livestream beamed from the Moon
- 260Mbps transfer speeds send video more than 250,000 miles
- AWS GovCloud has an important role in NASA simulations
Amazon Web Services – the biggest cloud hyperscaler with a market share equaling the combined share of both Microsoft and Google – just helped to enable the first-ever like 4K video stream from the Moon.
The company transmitted video footage from the Orion spacecraft by laser, with an estimated 25 million people watching the coverage across NASA+, YouTube and Amazon’s own Prime Video platform.
Not only is this the first time 4K video has ever been transmitted from the Moon to Earth, but it’s also major news for video transmission by laser optics instead of conventional radio.
AWS enabled 260Mbps transfer speeds via laser
Key to supporting the video transmission was NASA’s Orion Artemis II Optical Communications System (O2O) – a laser-based terminal more than 20 years in the making that supports up to 260Mbps transfer speeds. In other words, fast enough for real-time 4K video and other crucial mission data.
Generally, streaming platforms like Amazon Prime Video would recommend having internet speeds of 15-20Mbps to stream 4K video. With NASA and AWS opening up 260Mbps, more than enough buffer was available to continue transmitting other key telemetry, voice communications, mission data and other files.
Unlike traditional radio systems, optical communications promise much higher bandwidth and are better suited to transmitting much larger datasets, thus they are expected to become increasingly important as space exploration pushes new boundaries.
In this case, laser transmissions were received by Mount Stromlo Observatory near Canberra, Australia, and NASA’s White Sands Complex in New Mexico was responsible for processing and distributing signals. “AWS, NASA, and ANU partnered and stood up the connection in a matter of weeks, for the cost of a laptop,” the company declared.
All in, the video was transmitted an estimated quarter of a million miles, “connecting viewers to the farthest humans ever to travel from Earth.”
But Amazon’s partnership with NASA runs even deeper than this, with the company hosting the official NASA+ streaming platform using AWS Elemental services.
Amazon plays a crucial role in NASA’s trajectory
Besides video, Amazon’s cloud infrastructure also proves instrumental to other core NASA operations. Its flight sciences team at the Johnson Space Center runs tens of thousands of trajectory simulations for every launch opportunity, producing as much as 2-5TB of data per launch window.
Amazon proudly proclaimed that these simulations run on AWS GovCloud (US), enabling maximum security for sensitive data. Using a technique known as cloud bursting, NASA is able to “scale into hundreds of additional Intel-based cloud instances on demand,” allowing it to retarget and optimize trajectory in near real-time.
Mission control aside, Amazon’s huge video streaming success lays out the framework for future space missions, including the upcoming Artemis IV lunar landing which NASA hopes to get into the hands of 250 million live viewers.
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