Case Study: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory achieves rapid, cost-effective massive image processing for ATHLETE and Mars missions with Amazon Web Services

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory - Customer Case Study

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) develops the ATHLETE multi‑limbed rover and runs annual Desert Research and Training Studies (D‑RATS) field tests where operators depend on high‑resolution satellite imagery for navigation and situational awareness. Processing those large image datasets quickly and at scale was a bottleneck, so JPL adopted cloud-based processing to streamline the workflow.

JPL deployed its Polyphony orchestration framework on AWS, using Amazon EC2 and Amazon SQS to distribute massive computations across many nodes. The solution processed a 3.2 gigapixel image in under two hours on 30 Cluster Compute Instances and enabled nearly 200,000 Cassini images to be processed in hours for under $200—dramatically faster, more scalable, and far more cost‑effective than the previous 15‑day, single‑machine approach—now supporting both ATHLETE operations and Mars Science Laboratory pipelines.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Khawaja Shams

Senior Solution Architect