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Building Dhruv Drishti: An Autonomous Polar Digital Twin on AWS for Antarctic Climate Resilience

Building Dhruv Drishti: An Autonomous Polar Digital Twin on AWS for Antarctic Climate Resilience

How we built Dhruv Drishti for the AWS Environmental Hacks—an autonomous digital twin for India's Antarctic research stations using AWS IoT Core, ECS Fargate, Lambda, and dual-layer ML anomaly detection to survive -55°C polar extremes.

Aarush Bharti

Engineering Student @ IIIT Bhopal | C++ Developer | Open-Source (GSSoC)|Top 0.1% Flipkart GRiD

Building Dhruv Drishti: An Autonomous Polar Digital Twin on AWS

Antarctica’s extreme cryosphere drives global atmospheric currents, deep ocean conveyor belts, and planetary weather patterns. In this hyper-fragile, frozen wilderness, India operates two vital scientific outposts: Bharati Station (Larsemann Hills) and Maitri Station (Schirmacher Oasis).
Operating in sub-zero temperatures plunging below -55°C, hurricane-force katabatic winds exceeding 160 km/h, and complete seasonal isolation with zero physical resupply for up to 8 months, even minor equipment drift or an unpredicted blizzard can escalate into a mission-critical catastrophe.
For the AWS Environmental Hacks 2026, our team built Dhruv Drishti (ध्रुव दृष्टि — "Polar Vision"): an autonomous, cloud-native environmental digital twin and predictive life-support intelligence platform built on Amazon Web Services (AWS).


The Core Challenge: Polar Edge Isolation

Monitoring infrastructure in Antarctica presents three unique engineering hurdles:
  1. Extreme Atmospheric Shocks: Sudden cyclonic blizzards and rapid barometric pressure drops trigger freeze-ups of fuel lines and HVAC air intakes within minutes.
  1. High-Latency Satellite Links (VSAT): Geomagnetic storms and polar blizzards regularly cause satellite blackouts. Telemetry cannot rely solely on constant internet availability.
  1. Disjointed Sensor Streams: Meteorological observations from Automatic Weather Stations (AWS) and mechanical health telemetry from generators, batteries, and water reclamation systems operate in silos.


Cloud Architecture: Bridging Antarctica to AWS

To solve these challenges, Dhruv Drishti employs a resilient edge-to-cloud architecture designed with AWS serverless and containerized primitives:

1. Telemetry Ingestion via AWS IoT Core

Sensor channels spanning generator RPM, bearing vibrations, indoor/outdoor temperatures, HVAC pressures, fuel reserves, and battery state-of-charge (SOC) are transmitted over satellite MQTT directly to AWS IoT Core.
IoT Core SQL rules filter and direct data streams with sub-second latency:
SQL
SELECT * FROM 'polar/stations/+/telemetry'

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