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Comment by linebeck | Hacker News Reader

Cool post. I'd be interested in seeing models likes this deployed to the satellites themselves.

Typically, data gathered from satellites needs to wait for the satellite to do a pass over a dedicated ground station before it can be processed, which is probably somewhere in the US. If you move the processing from the ground station to the satellite, then you 1. Don't have to transmit as much data, 2. Can transmit actionable intelligence much faster. It can be upwards of 90 minutes before a satellite passes over it's ground station. If you could get that down to a few seconds, I could see some serious applications in disaster response.

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> It can be upwards of 90 minutes before a satellite passes over it's ground station.

Planet Pelican will have the ability to communicate with other satellites, meaning you don't necessarily need a ground station: https://www.planet.com/products/pelican/

> 1. Don't have to transmit as much data

There is definitely a bit of a move to do some work on the actual satellite, depending on the use case. This is pretty doable if you have a very specific use case for which you can optimize this, but gets a little bit harder if you have to have it work for every possible use case.

From discussions I've seen online, a lot can fail on satellites so there is a bias to do as little as possible on them. There does appear to be plenty of bandwidth to transmit back to ground stations.

The real win will be satellite-to-satellite transmissions where any data collected by the constellation is passed to the satellite that'll next fly over a ground station. This will lower the time from capture to analysis considerably. The fresher the data, the more valuable it is.

It’s possible I’m missing visibility into some part of the industry, but I don’t think this has been true for quite some time. There are multiple providers of Ground Segment as a Service that satellite operators can buy radio time from across the globe that are in the billions of yearly revenue. Most satellites are transmitting to the nearest ground stations in one or more networks live and transported over IP unless that capability isn’t required.

Even AWS sells it. Pretty much a commodity.

I’m literally working on this at Planet right now :)

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240610385569/en/Pla...

Wouldn't that be prohibitive energy-wise? AFAIK satellites are not abundant in electrical power.

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