How big data is fueling a new age in space exploration
In 2018, a group of organizations from all of the world will begin construction of the largest radio telescope ever built, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). With one million square meters of collecting area and enough optical fiber to wrap around the Earth twice, this marvel of modern engineering will be sensitive enough to detect airport radar on a planet 50 light years away. SKA will also generate 700 terabytes of data every second, equivalent to roughly 35 times the data stored in the Library of Congress.
With one million square meters of collecting area and enough optical fiber to wrap around the Earth twice, this marvel of modern engineering will be sensitive enough to detect airport radar on a planet 50 light years away. SKA will also generate 700 terabytes of data every second, equivalent to roughly 35 times the data stored in the Library of Congress. At full capacity, the SKA’s aperture arrays are expected to produce 100 times more data than the entire Internet. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that such a deluge of information creates a big data problem, perhaps the biggest we have ever encountered.
Solving this big data problem for the space industry requires innovation in the data storage, processing, and access (or visualization) technologies, which, in turn, creates ample opportunities for startups and large data crunching companies to take advantage of.
Visualization is the other important aspect of making geospatial data useful to the end customer. Whether you are a farmer looking to assess how soil moisture content affects vegetation levels across your fields or a government agency trying to identify deforestation patterns and illegal logging operations, the way data is analyzed and presented can be partial to the end result.
The market for geographic information systems (GIS) is estimated at $2.5 billion, the data visualization market stands at $4.2 billion, and location-based services stand at $7.5 billion. No wonder Google has been actively building on top of its platform by acquiring complementary assets such as Skybox Imaging and Titan Aerospace earlier this year. By combining satellite and drone imagery with its computing power and content delivery capabilities, Google has a chance to build the first fully vertically integrated GIS service and perhaps take Google Earth platform LIVE someday.
While it does seem more glamorous to be launching rockets and building space stations, the truth of the matter is that major dollars will still be made on Earth by data crunchers converting space bytes into beautiful maps and infographics that anyone of us can use.
