AWS Ground Station lets you control and ingest satellites data without having to buy or build satellite ground station infrastructure. AWS Ground Station integrates ground station equipment like antennas, digitizers, and modems into our AWS Regions around the world so all you have to do is onboard your satellites and schedule time to communicate with them. You can conduct all of your satellite operations on the AWS Cloud, including storing, processing, and delivering your satellite data. Or you can use AWS Ground Station to downlink your satellite data and transport it to your own ground infrastructure for processing and delivery.
Schedule satellites and download data using AWS services
You can use the AWS Ground Station console to identify the satellites you need to communicate with and schedule “Contacts” with the satellite, where each Contact consists of a selected satellite, start and end time, and the ground location. After scheduling your Contacts, you can launch Amazon EC2 instances to run each portion of the Contact. You can launch a Command EC2 instance to receive operational telemetry from your satellite and transmit commands up to the satellite to schedule future activities. You can also launch a Downlink EC2 instance to receive receive bulk mission data from your satellite in near real-time or receive the data in an Amazon S3 Bucket asynchronously. The EC2 instance will communicate with AWS Ground Station’s antenna gateway over an elastic network interface (ENI) connection in Amazon VPC that exists for the duration of the contact.
Fully managed global ground station network integrated with AWS Global Infrastructure
AWS Ground Station antennas are located within fully managed AWS ground station locations, and are interconnected via Amazon’s low-latency, highly reliable, scalable and secure global network backbone. Data downlinked and stored in one AWS Region can be sent to other AWS Regions over the global network, so it can be further processed.
Wideband Digital Intermediate Frequency
With Wideband Digital Intermediate Frequency (DigIF), AWS Ground Station provides users the ability to 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. Wideband DigIF helps customers to build a global ground segment, while centralizing their software-defined radios (SDRs) in a separate AWS Region.
Graphical AWS Ground Station console
AWS Ground Station provides an easy to use graphical console that allows you to reserve contacts and antenna time for your satellite communications. You can review, cancel, and reschedule contact reservations up to 15 minutes prior to scheduled antenna times.
Direct access to AWS services
AWS Ground Station provides our satellite antennas direct access to AWS services for faster, simpler and more cost-effective storage and processing of downloaded data. This allows you to reduce data processing and analysis times for use cases like weather prediction or natural disaster imagery from hours to minutes or seconds. This also enables you to quickly create business rules and workflows to organize, structure, route the satellite data before it can be analyzed and incorporated into key applications such as imaging analysis and weather forecasting. Key AWS services include Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon VPC, Amazon Rekognition, Amazon SageMaker, and Amazon Kinesis Data Streams.
Support most common satellites and communication frequencies
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.
Pay-per-minute pricing
You can schedule access to AWS Ground Station antennas on a per-minute basis and pay only for the scheduled time. You can access any antenna in the ground station network, and there are no long-term commitments.
Get started with AWS Ground Station