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COLORADO SPRINGS—Space computing specialist Sophia Space has announced a strategic collaboration with Canadian satellite telecommunications provider Kepler Communications under which the California startup will demonstrate software and hardware in orbit starting later this year.
Announcing the collaborative venture at the 2026 Space Symposium being held April 13-16 here, Sophia Space says it will deploy and operate NVIDIA-powered edge compute nodes on Kepler satellites beginning in the fourth quarter. Sophia says the missions will effectively demonstrate processing data in space instead of sending it back to Earth, and are designed to validate software and hardware integration in orbit as well as show the performance of distributed node management at scale.
Along with demonstrating Sophia’s Orbital Data Center (ODC) software, the agreement paves the way for Sophia to use the Kepler satellite network for high-speed optical data relay. It also covers potential longer-term collaborations, including the joint development of ODC nodes on future Kepler satellites.
In addition to the software nodes, Sophia Space is also developing the Tile compute module—a 1-m ² (11-ft.²) unit measuring only 1 cm (0.4 in.) in depth. Each Tile is configured with four servers arranged in an array designed for solar-power generation on one side and passive cooling on the other.
Rob DeMillo, CEO and co-founder of Sophia Space, says the collaboration with Kepler “opens the door to new opportunities for our Tiles and ODC software—from hosted payloads to joint optical data nodes—while advancing a fundamentally new class of distributed computing systems designed to operate reliably in the harsh conditions of orbit.”
Kepler, meanwhile, announced in March that it completed the commissioning of distributed on-orbit computing across its Tranche 1 optical data relay constellation. Described by the company as the world’s first commercially operational optical data relay network, the laser communications relay system is intended to move more data faster than a radio communications-based system.
Each of the 300-kg (660-lb.) satellites in the 10-strong constellation has “a minimum of four optical terminals” allowing connection between terminals on other spacecraft, as well as aircraft and ground stations below, Kepler says. Over the last two years, Kepler has demonstrated establishing space-to-space, space-to-ground and space-to-air laser links using path-finding satellites.
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