Lockheed Martin, Amazon and Cisco have announced a new cooperation that will see Cisco Webex and Amazon Alexa integrated into NASA's Orion spacecraft.
This groundbreaking payload, called Callisto, will fly aboard the Orion spacecraft, which was built by Lockheed Martin for the US Space Agency's unmanned Artemis 1 mission around the Moon. Callisto will use Alexa and Webex to test and prove how commercial technology can be used for voice, video and whiteboard communications in outer space.
According to Plana Callahan, vice president and general manager of Lockheed Martin's Commercial Civil Space division, Callisto will show how these technologies can make astronauts more autonomous when exploring deep space.
Named after a favorite companion of the Greek goddess Artemis, Callisto offers a tailored hardware and software integration developed by engineers from all 3 companies that will allow Alexa to work without an internet connection and Webex to work on a tablet using Google's Deep Web. The NASA.
Virtual Crew Experience
Because Artemis 1 is an unmanned mission, Lockheed Martin, Amazon and Cisco have also created a virtual crew experience at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, TX that will allow operators to interact with Callisto from the control center of The mission.
Through these remote interactions, Callisto and NASA partners will be able to test and prove how cooperative voice and video technologies can help astronauts improve their effectiveness and situational awareness throughout their journey. mission by letting them access flight status and telemetry data with the ability to monitor devices. aboard Orion.
At the same time, video and audio of these interactions will be transmitted to Earth throughout the Artemis 1 mission so engineers can examine the performance of onboard systems while sharing the interactions with the public.
In fact, students, families, and space enthusiasts will be able to participate and virtually "walk through" the mission on Alexa-enabled devices by saying "Alexa, take me to the moon," while Webex video collaboration capabilities will provide opportunities for STEM. distance education and classroom learning events.
Artemis 1 is scheduled to launch early this year from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, for a multi-week journey around the moon and back. Cisco and Amazon will likely tell us more about how their technologies are used in space by the time the mission begins.
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