What is AWS Ground Station?

AWS Ground Station is a fully managed service that lets us control satellite communications, downlink and process satellite data, and scale our satellite operations quickly, easily and cost-effectively without having to worry about building or managing our 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, we must either build our 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, we 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. AWS Ground Station provide the AWS Cloud and their low-latency global fiber network right where our data is downlinked into our ground stations.

This enables us to easily control satellite communications, quickly ingest and process our satellite data, and rapidly integrate that data with our applications and other services running in the AWS Cloud.

For example, we can useAmazon 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 us save up to 80% on the cost of our ground station operations by using a fully-managed ground station instead of building and operating our own global ground station infrastructure. There are no long-term commitments, we pay only for how long we schedule the antennas, and we gain the ability to rapidly scale our satellite communications on-demand when our business needs it.

For more information on AWS Ground Station, refer here.

Thanks for reading my article till end. I hope you learned something special today. If you enjoyed this article then please share to your friends and if you have suggestions or thoughts to share with me then please write in the comment box.