Microsoft Cloud is taking a rocket ship to the stars. As the company seeks to expand its cloud horizons with the expansion of Azure Space.
In a blog post, Microsoft discusses new Azure and AI features that are coming to Azure Space. The company says the new additions and partnerships will break down barriers for those taking on space workloads.
Below are the main draws for the expansion of the Microsoft's plans:
- “NASA and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) are testing AI at the ultimate edge for Astronaut Safety.
- New partnerships are bringing development capabilities to on-orbit compute.
- Unlocking new on-orbit climate data applications with Thales Alenia Space (TAS).
- Developing new technologies with Loft Orbital to demonstrate re-taskable satellite functions and seamless connectivity to the terrestrial cloud.
- Demonstrating reconfigurable on-orbit compute and AI processing with Ball Aerospace.
- Rapidly analyzing spaceborne data with the new reference architecture for Azure Orbital with Azure Synapse.
- Empowering analysts with newly integrated Blackshark.ai geospatial models are available with Azure Orbital.”
Abilities
Astronaut Safety is interesting because it combines efforts from Microsoft, NASA, and HPE that will drive solutions automatically. Essentially, the service will add automatic equipment detection in space.
For example, glove monitors that will detect problems as Microsoft learned that astronaut gloves face the risk of cutting. Automatic detections can help avoid potential catastrophes.
“Using Microsoft's cloud computing platform, NASA and Microsoft created a computer vision application that identifies the condition of the space gloves. Once trained in the cloud, the app was deployed to the HPE Spaceborne Computer-2, an AI-enabled software and hardware platform, aboard the ISS, and then operated at the ultimate edge enabling both local and remote analysis of the glove conditions.”
Furthermore, Microsoft is using AI alongside Thales Alenia Space with better satellite imagery for climate data.
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