Constellations in the Cloud: Virtualizing Remote Sensing Systems

This work presents the Virtual Constellation Engine (VCE), a software framework and run-time system designed to facilitate exploration of different remote sensing constellation and sensor web configurations from an on-board processing perspective, using the cloud. Users can launch heterogeneous constellations, describe different on-board processing configurations, and simulate and verify autonomous operations. VCE eases development for applications leveraging complex compute resources and has been demonstrated on Amazon Web Services to provide speedups over 20,000× of state of practice systems.