Kratos Helps Launch Microsoft’s Azure Orbital

National security company Kratos has partnered with Microsoft to enable the launch of Microsoft Azure Orbital, a platform designed to provide "ground station-as-a-service" to the satellite industry.

According to Kratos, Azure Orbital is a managed service created to address the massive amounts of data from Earth observation and internet of things applications. 

“With Microsoft Azure Orbital, our customers can downlink data when and where they need it and rapidly gain insights to make decisions faster without having to invest in complex and expensive infrastructure that is not core to their business,” said Yves Pitsch, Microsoft's principal product manager of Azure Networking. 

Operators can tap Azure Orbital to communicate with and control their satellites, process data and scale operations in Azure without constructing their own ground station, Kratos said.

Azure Orbital is based on Microsoft's ground station-as-a-service platform, which provides virtualized infrastructure, orchestration and monitoring capabilities.

Kratos said Azure Orbital is partly founded on the company's OpenSpace products, such as the OpenSpace Digitizer, which converts the radio-frequency signal from the antenna into packets transferred through the OpenSpace Virtual Network Function.

The integrity of physical gateway-based devices and VNFs, which customers can choose through the Azure Marketplace, can be monitored with Kratos' OpenSpace OpsCenter Network Management Application. 

“Azure Orbital enables the ground station to become much more dynamic. Customers can automate and scale operations at unprecedented levels to reduce the time it takes for satellite data to be processed and analyzed,” said Michael Smith, senior vice president of Kratos' space, training and cyber division. 

Kratos announced that its OpenSpace products are available on the Azure Marketplace and can be used to expand the functionality of ground operations.