- Hello, and welcome to Community Chats.
I'm your host Aley Hammer.
And today we're joined with Jasminder Hayer,
an aerospace and satellite solutions architect here at AWS.
Jas, welcome to the show.
Here at AWS, we've set up industry verticals.
So can you share with our audience
why is it that we have teams specializing
in specific industries here at AWS?
- Hey Aley, thank you for having me.
Space data and technology are tackling complex issues
on earth and transforming lives
from deep space exploration, detecting bush fires
or wildfires and saving lives to smart reforming.
So organizations are using space data
in very innovative ways
and redefining how we search and make decisions.
Satellites are orbiting around the earth
and collecting enormous amounts of data every day.
According to one of our customers, Descartes Labs,
satellite collection will grow
from 3 million square kilometers a day
to 3 billion over the next five years.
We're reaching a point where it's impossible to store
and analyze this data manually.
And making sense of this data will require high computing.
AWS created Aerospace and Satellite Solutions
business segment based on our listening to our customers
who asked that we bring these best practices,
industry experience and continue to build and invent
on their behalf.
As you know, 90% of what we build
comes from our customer requests.
And 10% is us listening on our customers' behalf.
So at AWS, our A&S business segment focuses on
innovation and creative solutions,
particularly within the aerospace focused customers
and partners.
That could be space, space exploration, satellite services,
where we can have a significant impact
on our customer's missions.
- Well, it definitely makes sense that our customers
wanted best practices and industry experience
for their specific use cases
and how amazing that your team are providing resources
that uniquely meet the needs of aerospace customers.
It's such a niche.
You definitely, Jas, I wanted to say,
have one of the coolest verticals here at AWS.
You're very lucky to be in the space vertical,
but I wanna know what is it that you are seeing
in the aerospace industry?
Any trends that you can fill us in on?
- Absolutely, space is increasingly becoming
an area of focus
for both governments in Asia-Pacific and beyond.
Morgan Stanley estimates
that the global space industry will grow
to more than $1 trillion by 2040,
which includes the growing public sector interest
in this segment.
Space will also positively impact adjacent industries
like IT hardware, telecommunications, agriculture, mining,
climate monitoring and change, and many other industries.
Space is one of the six key priority areas
for the Australian Government who has a $1.5 billion
modern manufacturing strategy in place.
So by enabling public sector organizations
to advance space and organization capabilities,
AWS is helping the Asia-Pacific region
to help build space infrastructure and industry resilience
in that way.
The Singapore Government has earmarked space
as one of the new industry clusters
that it's focused on as well.
South Korea recently announced that'll invest $1.3 billion
over the next 10 years to expedite the development
of the key space technologies they require.
And also the Japan space industry is estimated
at $10 billion annually,
with the government trying to double the size
by the early 2030s.
- Incredible.
I had no idea that the space industry was set to grow
by more than a trillion dollars by 2040.
I did read that somewhere as well.
It's absolutely insane.
And with all that growth,
what are some of the more exciting things
that our customers are doing?
Jas, what I wanted to ask you is
if you can share any of the cutting edge use cases
that you are observing
that our customers are building, that would be so great.
- This is the best part of the being able
to tell my customer stories, I have to say.
So today, customers around the world,
and I have to say because space is such a global business,
are using AWS Cloud Services and Solutions.
And that could be things like data lakes or storage,
edge computing, virtual mission operations,
or connectivity solutions, like AWS Ground Station,
to process images and machine learning
and create end-to-end solutions.
One such customer from Australia,
High Earth Orbit Robotics, or HEO Robotics,
they assess the risk of orbital debris
and evaluate the state of a satellite.
So I know it sounds technical,
but once you put a satellite in orbit,
you need to know how it is, how it's behaving,
whether it's been impacted or hit by something.
So they use space-based assets, existing satellites,
and they repurpose them to focus on other satellites
and instead of launching their own.
And so they're mitigating,
rather than contributing to space debris.
Just for an idea,
the Space Surveillance Network, which is a global network,
it tracks more than 27,000 pieces of space junk
which pose a risk to active satellites in orbit today.
In Australia, again, XE uses satellite imagery to monitor
and protect communities from wildfires.
They process more than 2.5 million images every day
to identify the outbreak of a wildfire within three minutes
and let authorities know, our first responders know,
where a fire may be breaking out.
This three minutes can have a huge impact
and save massive lives.
In Singapore, EO Factory,
which is an artificial intelligence based observation
analytics platform, is launching its insight studio
for earth observation, on AWS again,
to help farmers help industries make key decisions
driving sustainable practices.
In India, to help farmers achieve better outcomes,
AWS partner SatShore,
which has a decision intelligence platform,
has been working with governments locally,
like the Government of Telangana
to provide space based intelligence
for effective agriculture practices and risk monitoring.
So SatShore uses AWS again to help build
planetary scale applications.
Again, the global aspect of space solutions are using cloud
as well as open data from AWS registry of open data as well.
And lastly, something bit more edge
is how will humans explore, experiment and sustain
themselves long-term in space in (indistinct) orbit?
Orbital Reef is one such organization
which is building the next generation of space stations
and which is currently in development
to help commercialize and provide research capabilities
in space to organizations.
So AWS and Amazon are helping Orbital Reef
in re-imagining what networking, logistics
and communication will look like,
which will be an integral part of the space station,
as you can imagine.
So these are just some of the customers
we're working with today with this industry.
- Absolutely incredible.
Thank you so much for sharing
because sometimes people don't know
what types of customers are doing in this space,
but it's so cool to hear
a large array of different examples there.
Jas, we've spoken a little bit about
why Amazon verticalize our industries,
but what does this actually mean for our customers?
What are they getting out of it
when they know that there's a specialized team
working just on space, for instance?
- I think cloud computing's gonna play such a critical role
in the next frontier of space exploration,
communication, and innovation.
So the most effective way we know to gain faster insights,
get answers and make decisions from space-based data
is with cloud technologies like machine learning
and artificial intelligence.
And with the massive increase in satellite launches,
data analytics will play a huge role
in being able to synthesize and analyze that data
coming down from satellites.
Just as importantly,
we know that customers need to access and share this data
globally and securely as well.
So AWS is enabling governments and commercial customers
across the globe to share data seamlessly,
both across multiple levels of security
and certification levels.
Also, we know that we are helping partners today
store and analyze these huge amounts of data
very very quickly and efficiently,
because that's what we do every day.
Based on, again, listening to our customers
to access their satellite data faster, at a lower cost,
AWS developed the grand station capability,
which enables customers to communicate with the satellite,
transmit and receive data
in multiple regions around the world.
At the moment, we have 10 grand station sites,
which can be be used globally by customers
and the data can be downlinked or downloaded
and put in any other part of the world
as required by customers,
making it very cost effective.
Instead of building and managing
your own grant station infrastructure,
which can be very expensive,
you can consume the grand station service
and only pay for the time you use it for.
An example of that is Adelaide-based company called Myriota,
which has built a satellite IOT connectivity provider.
It's enabling customers to send IOT driven insights
at a very low cost from anywhere on Earth.
As an AWS partner, so Myriota uses AWS for its data storage
and processing and cloud based delivery.
AWS is gonna continue to expand its global footprint
of grand station sites, building antenna systems
at and near AWS regions and where our customers
really need that capability.
Around the world, with more regions coming up as well
to be supported, as well as more (indistinct) locations
coming soon.
- So incredible, Jas.
So round off this interview.
Everyone keeps talking about space domain awareness.
So I wanna know what is it and why the heck is it important?
- So collisions in space are a growing risk
due to the rising chance.
We have so many more launches happening
every other week.
If you were to follow the news,
you'll say there's always satellites being launched
in the hundreds, if not thousands at a certain time
and deploying spacecrafts,
and multiple stages of spacecrafts as well.
So there's a continuation risk of fragmentation.
Even a single collision can create
thousands of pieces of debris.
And the biggest risk is from these 600,000 to 900,000 pieces
of which are uncataloged, untracked.
And they range anywhere between five millimeters
to 10 centimeters.
So they're very small
and they're all estimated to be in the low earth orbit.
Space domain awareness is the ability to know
and understand what is flying overhead, effectively,
so that you can either avoid it
or take measures to go around it so that you don't damage
any of your spacecrafts as well.
AWS customers LeoLabs tracks thousands of these objects
per hour using very unique ground based sensors
and radars globally.
And they operate around the clock
and they are able to track debris
as small as two centimeters.
They provide these insights through a software
as a service platform
and to deliver something around 526 measurements every day
and in excess of 18,000 conjunction messages every day.
Conjunction is when two satellites are likely to collide
or come close to each other.
And other customers like Digantara out of India
are building building solutions like space climate
and object tracker to track even debris
smaller than one centimeter in size, using satellites
and provide an up to date tracking service and catalog
to satellite operators everywhere.
- Absolutely mind boggling.
This is such an interesting chat, Jas.
As I said before,
you've definitely one of the cooler jobs here at Amazon.
I'm very jealous.
You get to work with such cool customers.
Thank you so much for coming on this show.
No, I'm not jealous.
I really love my role,
but it sounds very cool, but Jas, thank you so much.
If anyone has any questions,
please pop them in the comments section below
and we'll get back to you.
Thank you so much.
- Thank you.