Designing (Not Only) Lunar Space Data Centers

An unprecedented amount of data generated in space missions triggers lots of practical challenges and concerns with its transfer, storage, and analysis. As Lunar and deep space missions emerge, we need to also face the challenges of distributed computing and big data analytics. In this paper, we outline these issues and discuss how to design and analyze Lunar data centers, being space data centers designed for distributed computing, and data analysis for (not only) Lunar missions. We investigate the opportunities and chances of such space architectures to lay the foundations for practical space data centers and real-life use cases.