AWS Ground Station Documentation

AWS Ground Station enables you to control and ingest data from orbiting satellites without having to buy or build satellite ground station infrastructure. The service integrates ground station functionalities like antennas, digitizers, and modems into our AWS Regions around the world. If needed, you can use Digital Intermediate Frequency (IF) delivery and bring your own modem. You have the option of conducting all of your satellite operations on the AWS Cloud, including the storing and processing of your satellite data and delivering your products using AWS services, or use AWS Ground Station just to downlink your satellite data and transport it to your own processing center.

AWS Ground Station antennas are located within managed AWS locations, and are interconnected via Amazon’s global network backbone. As a result, downlinked data is stored in one AWS Region and can be sent to other AWS Regions over the global network.

After onboarding your satellite to AWS Ground Station, you can easily schedule contacts with your satellite. Simply access the AWS Management Console via AWS Ground Station, and just select your satellite, a start and end time, and the preferred ground station location. After scheduling your Contact, you launch Amazon EC2 instances to send satellite commands or receive telemetry and/or mission data. When sending satellite commands, an EC2 instance communicates over an elastic network interface (ENI) connection in Amazon VPC for the duration of the contact. Received telemetry and/or mission data is delivered to EC2 or Lambda for real-time processing or stored in an Amazon S3 bucket for asynchronous processing.

Once onboarded, you can connect with any satellite in low Earth orbit (LEO) and medium Earth orbit (MEO) operating in X-band and S-band frequencies, including: S-band uplink and downlink, X-band narrowband and wideband downlink.

Wideband DigIF allows customers to build a global ground segment by centralizing their software-defined radios (SDRs) in a separate AWS Region. AWS Ground Station leverages Wideband Digital Intermediate Frequency (DigIF) to let customers downlink up to five channels (400 MHz total) per polarity. This feature delivers VITA-49.2 data across AWS’s low-latency, high bandwidth global network into a satellite operator’s Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Data is delivered to either an Amazon EC2 for real-time processing or an Amazon S3 for asynchronous processing.  

You can use the AWS Management Console or AWS Ground Station APIs to reserve contacts and antenna time for your satellite communications. With AWS Ground Station’s console or APIs, you can review, cancel, and reschedule contact reservations up to 15 minutes prior to scheduled antenna times.

Once you complete all licensing and onboard your satellite, you can schedule access to AWS Ground Station antennas on a per-minute basis and pay only for the scheduled time, using On-Demand or Reserved pricing. On-Demand pricing lets you pay for antenna access no long-term commitments; whereas, Reserved pricing provides a discounted rate and improved scheduling window, compared to On-Demand, with a monthly commitment.

For additional information about service controls, security features and functionalities, including, as applicable, information about storing, retrieving, modifying, restricting, and deleting data, please see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/index.html. This additional information does not form part of the Documentation for purposes of the AWS Customer Agreement available at http://aws.amazon.com/agreement, or other agreement between you and AWS governing your use of AWS’s services.