SpaceX has recently announced their ambition to take humankind to mars and to make us a multi-planetary species. After SpaceX also received a $1.6 billion contract from NASA to resupply the International Space Station (SpaceX, 2016), the company is the fueled by an immense growth rate. To continue the transformation of space exploration, the firm hopes to receive over $10 billion in the next years.
So how does big data come into play? By the time you have read solely this sentence, NASA would have already gathered nearly 2 gigabytes of data from their current undertakings (NASA, 2016). With the growth and development of this market, SpaceX plans to launch more satellites and collect even larger amounts of data to help support their space missions. This data is seen as one of the most important resources to help the research and science behind these undertakings.
One of the biggest steps forward will be the construction of the Square Kilometer Array (SKA); one of the biggest multi-radio telescopes in the world. Due to its size, the project is planning to be built in South Africa and Australia, generating an Exabyte (= one billion gigabytes) of raw data per day to explore the unknown. Researchers even expect up to 700 Terabytes of data per second to be processed from the SKA alone (SKA, 2016).
It is not only the SKA which provide us with data for future developments; other technologies such as NASA’s Mars Rover upload tens of thousands of data points, helping us learn and study new planets (Forbes, 2016).
What is important is not the amount of data we collect from these processes, but much rather how we analyze and use them to create value. Information and Data is a fundament on which most of the operations of SpaceX, NASA and all other space exploration corporations are built upon. As this industry is fueled with the growth of information technology, there will be an increasing big data challenge to make use of this information in the most viable way. Currently, we are only just in the early stages of exploring the big data universe, but what lies ahead is boundless economy of digital opportunities.
References
Forbes.com. (2016). Forbes. [online] Available at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2016/04/14/amazing-big-data-at-nasa-real-time-analytics-150-million-miles-from-earth/2/#28e1bb02ae1e [Accessed 28 Sep. 2016].
openNASA. (2016). What is NASA doing with Big Data today? | openNASA. [online] Available at: https://open.nasa.gov/blog/what-is-nasa-doing-with-big-data-today/ [Accessed 28 Sep. 2016].
SKA Telescope. (2016). The Square Kilometre Array SKA Home. [online] Available at: https://www.skatelescope.org/ [Accessed 28 Sep. 2016].
SpaceX. (2016). Company. [online] Available at: http://www.spacex.com/about [Accessed 28 Sep. 2016].
Hi Fabian,
thanks a lot for this post.
With the recent announcement from Elon Musk & SpaceX, the topic is very up-to-date. Personally, I was not aware how much data is gathered by NASA every second.
This brings us closer to discovering what outer space has in store. As we know from the history, one of the biggest discoveries in biology and anthropology, the theory of evolution by Charles Darwin also started with.. gathering data on different animals, while sailing on the HMS Beagle ship.
As you rightly pointed out, the key lies in finding meaningful patterns from the vast amount of data collected. I hope that NASA, SpaceX and alike organisations will share their findings and make the databases an open source, so people around the world could take a look into that and try to find answer to the questions about the space we’ve been asking ourselves for a long time. Don’t you agree?
In case someone missed the SpaceX announcement, check this recap from Wired https://www.wired.com/2016/09/elon-musk-colonize-mars/?mbid=nl_92816_p1&CNDID=