The Geospatial Modelling and Analysis team at CSIR manages an X-Band antenna on their premises since 2008, which facilitates the processing of broadcasts from the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) and VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) instruments. This capability forms a foundational component of the AFIS (https://afis.co.za/map/) wildfire monitoring product suite, among others.
The location of the X-Band antenna has unfortunately been affected by radio frequency interference in the urban area where it is located. This has a negative impact on satellite communication quality and operational efficiency of the AFIS service.
The Geospatial Modelling and Analysis team at CSIR manages an X-Band antenna on their premises since 2008, which facilitates the processing of broadcasts from the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) and VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) instruments. This capability forms a foundational component of the AFIS (https://afis.co.za/map/) wildfire monitoring product suite, among others.
The location of the X-Band antenna has unfortunately been affected by radio frequency interference in the urban area where it is located. This has a negative impact on satellite communication quality and operational efficiency of the AFIS service.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) introduced AWS Ground Station, which streamlines the ingestion, processing, and distribution of satellite data. AWS Ground Station has established antenna locations worldwide, including Cape Town. This specific location extends geographical coverage and enables broader spatial and temporal coverage over South Africa.
CHALLENGES
The CSIR faces a number of challenges with their X-Band antenna:
- Need for Upgraded Infrastructure:
Upgrading the current antenna location with RFI shielding technology, which involves installing physical barriers or advanced materials that block or limit interference.
Upgrading to more advanced antenna systems that are inherently resistant to interference.
Enhancing the ability of the antenna to distinguish between noise (interference) and actual data might require upgraded signal processors. - Aging Compute and Storage Infrastructure:
The current AFIS compute infrastructure is aging and may not efficiently run newer software needed to support more recent satellite broadcast processing.
Upgrade to storage solutions that provide faster, more reliable data access and better security. - Overall Capital Requirements: The total capital required would depend on the extent of upgrades decided upon. For a comprehensive upgrade involving new technology hardware, software enhancements, and infrastructure modernization, the costs could run into several millions of Rands.
- Reduced Communication Quality: The local radio frequency interference can degrade the quality of the signals received by the antenna. This might result in higher error rates of satellite communications.
- Impact on Research and Development: For scientific research, interference can corrupt the collected data, leading to inaccurate results or misleading scientific conclusions.
WHY MFT
MFT Executive Advisory Services have been providing cutting edge cloud solutions to the Aerospace and Satellite sector since 2018. We have developed an industry leading solution to deliver a near real-time Wildfire Monitoring service. We consider the opportunity to partner with CSIR as a privilege and a critical step towards enhancing fire detection capabilities within South Africa.
Our integrated wildfire monitoring and alerting solution provides a satellite-to-end user service that features:
Exceptional Response Time: A state-of-the-art fire detection solution ensuring rapid response times of less than 20 minutes.
Streamlined Implementation: MFT enhances efficiency and simplifies deployment processes.
AWS Infrastructure Integration: Our partnership with AWS ensures scalable, reliable, and secure solutions, ready for future advancements.
Unmatched Expertise: Leveraging insights from the International Space University to provide unparalleled expertise in space-related technologies.
WHY AWS
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has helped thousands of organizations migrate to the cloud and modernize their infrastructure and applications. Migrating with AWS helps businesses focus more on core competencies and achieve benefits faster while substantially lowering costs, increasing speed, and improving productivity, business agility, and operational resiliency.
Customers use AWS technologies to re-imagine space systems, quickly turn data into actionable information, accelerate innovation, and realize mission success. We offer the most advanced, secure cloud infrastructure, broadest service portfolio, and extensive space industry expertise.
THE SOLUTION
Our Wildfire Monitoring solution uses services such as AWS Ground Station, Amazon S3, Amazon ECS as core services. Here’s an expansion and explanation of the solution.
- AWS Ground Station: This service is fully managed and lets you control satellite communications, process data, and scale your operations without having to worry about building or managing your own ground station infrastructure. In this setup, AWS Ground Station is used for downloading data from satellites, processing PCAP with Lambda, and then storing the results in S3.
- Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3): S3 is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. This service is extensively used in our architecture as a storage solution. This means our customers can use it to store and protect any amount of data for a range of use cases, such as data lakes, websites, mobile applications, backup and restore, archive, enterprise applications, IoT devices, and big data analytics.
- Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS): ECS is used for managing containerized applications that process the satellite feed and produce usable information. ECS allows you to run, stop, and manage containers on a cluster. In our architecture, ECS handles multiple applications and services that process or analyze the satellite data which is stored in S3. The infrastructure employs Fargate, making the solution fully serverless.
In addition to the core services above, we utilized the following support services: - AWS Step Functions for orchestrating our data flows and processing pipelines;
- AWS Lambda for handling data processing tasks.
- Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) for sending messages or alerts in response to certain events or conditions.
- Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring and logging the operations of services like ECS and AWS Ground Station.
- Amazon EventBridge for routing different events from AWS Ground Station or ECS to other services for processing or notification purposes.
A high-level view of our solution architecture is shown below.
RESULTS
The Wildfire Monitoring solution offers the capability to process and distribute active fire hotspot data from VIIRS sensors and enables the CSIR (Next Generation Enterprises & Institutions) to issue wildfire alerts to clients within 30 minutes.
The flexibility of managing the reservation of contacts through the AWS console provides CSIR with the option to choose the most appropriate:
Overpass of three JPSS-1, JPSS-2 and SNPP satellites;
Optimal elevation angle to ensure suitable coverage over South Africa;
Overpass time during the day
BENEFITS
The Wildfire Monitoring solution provides a necessary solution for overpass conflicts experienced on the existing MODIS Direct Broadcast (DB) station located at the CSIR campus, augmenting our number of observations.
The Wildfire Monitoring solution offers a fallback of using other data streams when an overpass from a specific sensor is not available due to technical faults. SNPP is for example not transferring data since 10 July 2024, but the other VIIRS sensors can be used.
The contact reservation features facilitate the use of remotely sensed hotspots in support of fire management through the rapid detection, geolocation and timely monitoring during a fire event for the AFIS (Advanced Fire Information System) end user.
Development of technical skills and knowledge on AWS platform and satellite data pipelines of CSIR team members.
The implementation of the Wildfire Monitoring solution fostered a strong partnership between MFT and CSIR, which opened possibilities of future work and collaboration within the AWS environment.
