Amazon drones are coming. They really are. Amazon has asked the government’s permission to test its drones near its Seattle headquarters–not one of the six sites already approved by the FAA. Amazon’s case should be strengthened by a relationship it’s been nurturing for a while now. Earth’s number one online retailer can reassure the FAA that its drones will be the smartest. After all, it’s got NASA Earth Science Big Data at its fingertips. Amazon servers store huge amounts of data collected via NASA satellites. Even if a package falls in a tree, they’ll find it.
Amazon’s advantage isn’t proprietary though. NASA data is open to any company that can harness it. Wal-Mart, Barnes & Noble and QuiQui (they want to deliver drugs for pharmacies in San Francisco) figure to be paying close attention. All NASA data sets provided to Amazon Web Services are available to the public in a full and open manner, in line with the Obama Administration’s Open Data Executive Order.
NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) utilizes NASA’s largest and most powerful supercomputer Pleiades with 56,832 processors and a 1.4 petabyte storage capacity along with the hyperwall 2 visualization system (pictured above) with 128 screens and a total surface area of 23-feet by 10-feet.
