Cloud-based Space Situational Awareness: Initial Design and Evaluation

The need for a global collaborating space situational awareness (SSA) network, including radars, optical and other sensors for communication and surveillance, has become a top priority for most countries who own or operate man-made space-crafts. Such a SSA system requires vast storage, powerful computing capacity and the ability to serve hundreds of thousands of users to access the same database. These requirements make traditional distributed networking system insufficient. Cloud computing, which features scalable and elastic storage and computing services, has been recognized as an ideal candidate that can meet the challenges of SSA systems' requirements. In this paper, we propose a Cloud-based information fusion system for SSA and examine a prototype that serves space tracking algorithms. We discuss the benefits of using Cloud Computing as an alternative for data processing and storage and explore details of Cloud implementation for a representative SSA system environment.