Red Hat blasts RHEL 10.1 into orbit aboard Voyager's micro datacenter

"Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.1 has powered up on board a datacenter orbiting 250 miles or about 400 km above the earth. That RHEL-powered satellite is Voyager's LEOcloud Space Edge "micro" datacenter, which launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and hitched a ride on the International Space Station (ISS) back in September. The system is designed to demonstrate the advantages of processing data gathered directly in orbit, rather than sending info back to a terrestrial conventional datacenter."

"Voyager boasts the reduction in latency makes the system as much as 30x faster than sending all the data back to Earth. Originally developed by LEOcloud prior to its acquisition by Voyager last year, Space Edge is, as its name suggests, a low-power edge compute platform for orbital data processing. Voyager and Red Hat contend that "as commercial and government organizations increase their reliance on space-based data, the ability to process data in orbit is increasingly critical.""

"The company hasn't disclosed the hardware used in Voyager's Space Edge, stating only that it's a "space-hardened managed cloud infrastructure." Hardening is certainly a concern for complex electronics operating outside Earth's atmosphere, where charged particles and radiation can corrupt data or do permanent damage over time. HPE's Spacebourne compute platform demonstrated many of these challenges during its first mission aboard the ISS in 2017."

Voyager’s LEOcloud Space Edge “micro” datacenter operates in low Earth orbit about 250 miles above Earth and runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.1. The system launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and arrived at the International Space Station in September. It is built to process data gathered in orbit instead of transmitting all information to a terrestrial datacenter. Voyager and Red Hat claim the approach reduces latency and can be up to 30x faster than sending all data back to Earth. The platform is described as a low-power, space-hardened managed cloud infrastructure. An immutable upgrade is being provided alongside refreshed container images to improve reliability for off-world computing under radiation and power constraints.

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