9&10 News April 9, 2018 By David Lyden, Jeff Blakeman
The work of a northern Michigan space company is drawing the attention of NASA.
Atlas Space Operations is based out of Traverse City and NASA recently started testing their technology to bring information from satellites back down to earth.
It’s been called the second space race. Just how do we get all the information from the satellites circling the earth.
“When a satellite goes up into orbit it has a requirement to get the data down or it’s useless. So whether you’re tracking weather patterns, or ice flows, or ships, or animals whatever you are observing from a space craft the data needs to get back down to the user,” said Mike Carey, Chief Strategy Officer.
Traverse City based Atlas Space Operations has been working on that problem and says they’ve found the solution with the Atlas Links.
“The amount of satellites that’s being launched is at a record pace and what we’re trying to do is we’re disrupting the ground space, all of them have to talk to the ground. When the satellites are transmitting down to the ground our receivers are picking up the signal, they then get computed processed and then to our cloud based system,” said Mark Malosh, Chief Operating Officer.
It’s technology that’s caught the attention of NASA, NOAA and even the U.S. Air Force.
“To have real space geeks and rocket scientists say that our product is good enough for NASA that’s a seal of approval that gives us great pride,” said Carey.
And it’s likely just the start of what will be accomplished and discovered about our planet.
“To be able to work in the area of space and communications, it’s really pretty exciting and to have NASA NOAA, some of the big satellite providers, all those customers, pretty exciting to be able to do it up here too,” said Carey.
The Atlas Links should be ready for use at locations around the world this summer.
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