Earlier this year, we announced our vision to empower any developer to become a space developer through Azure. With over 90 million developers on GitHub, we have created a powerful ecosystem and we are focused on empowering the next generation of developers for space. Today, we are announcing a crucial step towards democratizing access to space development, with the preview release of Azure Orbital Space SDK (software development kit)--a secure hosting platform and application toolkit designed to enable developers to create, deploy, and operate applications on-orbit. By bringing modern cloud-based applications to spacecrafts we not only increase the efficiency, value, and speed of insights from space data but also increase the value of that data through the optimization of ground communication. Many of the fundamental technological improvements that have accelerated the growth of Internet of Things (IoT) in the past decade remain untapped by space development missions today.

Any developer can be a space developer with Azure. Microsoft has a long history of empowering the software development community. We have the world's most comprehensive developer tools and platforms from Github to Visual Studio, and we support a wide range of industries and use cases from healthcare, financial services, critical industries, and now space. As Microsoft expands its focus toward space, we are bringing the power, approachability, and security of our developer story to the next frontier. Microsoft is empowering developers with a platform for on-orbit compute at the ultimate edge, so that spacecraft running AI workloads are connected to the hyperscale Azure cloud.

Maëva Ghonda is a scientist born in Kinshasa, the great capital city of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Maëva is the editor-in-chief of the IEEE Quantum Computing Newsletter, the host of the Quantum AI Series Podcast, and the chair of the Quantum AI Institute. As a research scientist, her work is centered on technological innovations -- i.e. Quantum Computing, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning -- to tackle challenges in Pharma and Healthcare (e.g. Maëva Ghonda's passion for quantum computing ignited while working as Joint Quantum Institute Scholar.

British engineers are set to build a spacecraft that will track down and'ambush' comets in order to study them in unprecedented detail. The mission, dubbed the'comet chaser', will feature three main components, a mothership built by a company called Thales Alenia Space based in the UK, and two robotic probes which will be manufactured by the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA). Astronomers hope the highly-detailed 3D-scans of the space rock's surface will reveal secrets about the formation of comets and the early universe. British engineers are set to build a spacecraft that will track down and ambush comets in order to scan them in unprecedented detail. Comets are chunks of icy rock spewed out from fierce explosions following the universe's inception.

Software engineers are the most sought after in the drone industry both by platform manufacturers and by software companies. This is partly because some companies like Thales Alenia Space or DELAIR are both hardware and software manufacturers. Another reason is that hardware companies like the recently acquired Aeryon Labs, Flyability and Matternet are hiring software engineers for their R&D divisions firstly in order to continue increase the level of automation within their products (e.g. Hardware engineers are exclusively sought after by hardware manufacturers and, thanks to the many features which drones can and must contain, they come from a variety of backgrounds: electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and aeronautical engineering. Sales roles are the portion of drone jobs which are customer oriented and as drone companies grow bigger increasingly focus on specific regions (for example, companies seeking sales executives for specifically California, or the Eastern Cape).