Microsoft says it collaborated with the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration (NOAA) and its current partner Xplore. The goal was to see how it can use Azure commercial cloud services to enhance satellite missions for NOAA’s legacy polar satellites (NOAA-18). The result was Microsoft’s cloud could extend the life of the mission while also helping NOAA to reduce costs. Through a year-long cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) between Microsoft and NOAA, the partners were able to assess the qualities of the Azure Orbital Ground Stations platform: “This successful demonstration shows that the Azure Orbital GSaaS, and the partner network it brings together, enables sustainable outcomes for satellite operators. Our work with NOAA is just the beginning of the journey. We look forward to partnering with additional satellite operators to help them reduce their infrastructure management costs, lower latency, increase capacity and resiliency, and empower their missions through the power of Azure Orbital GSaaS and the Azure cloud.”
Azure Orbital
Microsoft launched Azure Orbital Ground Station as-a-service in 2021. Azure Orbital runs off its own datacenter located in Quincy, Washington. Microsoft is also using its Azure Modular Datacenters as part of the Azure Space initiative. These are caravan-sized mobile datacenters for computing and storage that can deploy in remote locations. While Microsoft is leading Azure Orbital with its own datacenters, the company is also teaming with several partners. Among them a Kratos, Kubos, Viasat, and US Electrodynamics Inc. Tip of the day: Did you know that your data and privacy might be at risk if you run Windows without encryption? A bootable USB with a live-linux distribution is often just enough to gain access to all of your files. If you want to change that, check out our detailed BitLocker guide where we show you how to turn on encryption for your system disk or any other drive you might be using in your computer.
