Xplore’s Major Tom ground station solutions utilize the cloud and demonstrate sustainability and resiliency capabilities

REDMOND, Wash., June 23, 2022 (Xplore PR)  — Xplore Inc., a commercial space company providing Space as a Service®, completed a satellite testing initiative using Microsoft Azure Orbital to conduct satellite operations for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s NOAA-18 satellite. Xplore is operating over a dozen satellites on orbit; the company completed its work with Azure and became one of the first cloud-based ground control software to operate a NOAA satellite.

Xplore integrated Azure Orbital as part of a first-ever Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) to demonstrate how commercial services and cloud operations can be used to securely control satellites and acquire data with NOAA satellites.

This demonstration is the keystone of an agreement between the two companies to enable new capabilities in the intersection of space and cloud.

CANNES, France, April 4, 2022 (Thales Alenia Space PR) – Thales Alenia Space, a joint venture between Thales (Euronext Paris: HO) (67%) and Leonardo (Milan stock exchange: LDO) (33%), announced a strategic collaboration with Microsoft to explore the enablement of new capabilities in the Space Edge Computing (SEC), Artificial Intelligence Space Observation tools (DeeperVision) and Digital Ground Segment.

In particular, Thales Alenia Space plans to deliver advanced connectivity, analytics and compute in space with Space Edge Computing (SEC) with Microsoft. To this end, the companies will demonstrate and validate on-orbit computing technologies and potentialities onboard the International Space Station (ISS) in 2023. Thales Alenia Space will deploy a powerful on-orbit computer, an on-orbit application framework, and high-performance Earth Observation sensors to unlock new on-orbit climate data processing applications for the benefits of our planet sustainability. Thales Alenia Space will work with Microsoft Research in remote sensing, computer vision and climate science to demonstrate the potential of next-generation on-orbit compute for Earth observation. This space edge computing capacity will allow gathering faster, to-the-point Earth observation insights immediately applicable for our planet’s surveillance, understanding and protection.