Image Courtesy of NASA

in February, Microsoft announced a partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to bring edge computing and artificial intelligence (AI) to the International Space Station (ISS) for the first time. The combination of these capabilities will be enabled through the combination of Microsoft's Azure platform and HPE's Spaceborne Computer-2 (SBC-2), which is already onboard the ISS.

Earlier this week, the companies announced they successfully completed the first round of experiments onboard the ISS with SBC-2. The experiments involved monitoring astronauts' health and sequencing their genomes to demonstrate how edge-to-cloud capabilities can help overcome bandwidth and computing limitations between the ISS and Earth. Essentially, the test helped determine whether astronauts can constantly monitor their health onboard a spacecraft.

"The experiment's successful completion—and the data collected through it—is proof of how an edge-to-cloud computing workflow can be used to support high-value use cases aboard the ISS that might otherwise be impossible due to compute and bandwidth constraints," said Gabe Monroy, vice president of Azure developer experience at Microsoft.

Historically, data transmission from the ISS has been incredibly slow, lacking the infrastructure needed to manage multiple functions at one time. The SBC-2 is a powerful supercomputer that's proven its ability withstand harsh space environments via a recent NASA and HPE project, but without the power of the cloud, transmitting and consistently monitoring astronaut health data would still be nearly impossible.

According to a Microsoft blog post, "The Spaceborne Computer-2 is only allotted two hours of communication bandwidth a week for transmitting data to Earth, with a maximum download speed of 250 kilobytes per second. That's less than 2 gigabytes a week — not even enough to download a Netflix movie — meaning it would take two years to transmit just one genomic dataset."

"It's like being back on a dial-up modem in the '90s," said David Weinstein, a principal software engineering manager for Microsoft's Azure Space division, which was created last year to support and help grow the global space industry.

Now, with the combined power of SBC-2 and Microsoft Azure, space to Earth data transmission and analysis can be done in minutes instead of months — an incredible achievement. This increased computing speed and processing power will not only be important for ISS missions, it can help with future space exploration efforts — including trips to Mars. On Mars missions today for example, it can take as long as 24 minutes to transmit a small data packet between Mars and Earth. This test is a first step in what is sure to be a game changer for computing capabilities available in space.

Microsoft Azure has more.