Announcing AWS Ground Station (Preview)
AWS Ground Station is a fully managed service that lets you control satellite communications, downlink and process satellite data, and scale your satellite operations quickly, easily and cost-effectively without having to worry about building or managing your own ground station infrastructure.
Satellites are used for a wide variety of use cases, including weather forecasting, surface imaging, communications, and video broadcasts. Ground stations are facilities that provide communications between the ground and the satellite by using antennas to receive satellite data and control systems to command and control the satellites. Today, you must either build your own ground stations and antennas, or obtain long-term leases with ground station providers, often in multiple countries to provide enough opportunities to contact the satellites as they orbit the globe. Once all this data is downlinked, you need servers, storage, and networking in close proximity to the antennas to process, store, and transport the data from the satellites.
AWS Ground Station eliminates these problems by delivering a satellite ground station-as-a-service. We provide the AWS Cloud and our low-latency global fiber network right where your data is downlinked into our ground stations. This enables you to easily control satellite communications, quickly ingest and process your satellite data, and rapidly integrate that data with your applications and other services running in the AWS Cloud. For example, you can use Amazon EBS, Amazon EFS, or Amazon S3 to store and share the data, hunt for real-time business insights with Amazon Kinesis Data Streams and Amazon EMR, apply machine learning algorithms and models with Amazon SageMaker, add image analysis with Amazon Rekognition, and improve data sets by combining satellite data with IoT sensor data from AWS Greengrass.
AWS Ground Station can help you save up to 80% on the cost of your ground station operations by using a fully-managed ground station instead of building and operating your own global ground station infrastructure. There are no long-term commitments, you pay only for how long you schedule the antennas, and you gain the ability to rapidly scale your satellite communications on-demand when your business needs it.
AWS Ground Station is available in preview. You can request access to the preview by submiting a request form here. Visit the detail page to learn more.