Space infrastructure company D-Orbit recently revealed it has successfully completed testing for Nebula: a cloud platform designed to offer data analytics and cloud storage for satellite activity in space.

The use of satellites for a wide range of earth activities is putting strain on their limited functionality. The need for faster orbital data processing will be critical for future business endeavors, inspiring D-Orbit engineers to develop a cloud platform that increases performance with machine learning and artificial intelligence.

As part of testing for the Nebula platform, D-Orbit employees launched 23 applications from a number of different partners, which included WorldFloods, Frontier Development Lab (FDL), and a collaboration between Trillium Technologies, University of Oxford, and ESA’s Phi-lab. After a series of application tests using preloaded satellite data and raw data, D-Orbit developers reported success for every testing objective.

“This is an important step towards D-Orbit’s vision of a comprehensive space infrastructure that will provide all kind of services to vehicles in Earth’s orbit,” commented Simon Reid, COO of the UK branch of D-Orbit. “While this batch of tests used mainly pre-loaded images, our follow-on mission, which will be ready for commercial use, will provide real-time access to instrument data. Everyone with programming knowledge can easily write apps to process all kind of data directly in space.”

D-Orbit intends to engage in another round of testing with the next version of Nebula, with plans scheduled for January 2022.

“We are currently seeing a fast global change in the space service market and the Nebula – SpaceCloud solution orbital success demonstrates a leap in the way business models around data can be implemented going forward. Commented Dr. Fredrik Bruhn,Board director at Unibap. “We are thrilled that extremely low-latency information products can be created in orbit. Going further, it is now possible to create flexible data management and user-on-demand on-orbit application services.”