Satellite

AWS Ground Station

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 at the core of global satellite networks, which are facilities that provide communications between the ground and the satellites by using antennas to receive data and control systems to send radio signals to command and control the satellite. 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 downloaded, 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 global ground station as a service. We provide direct access to AWS services and the AWS Global Infrastructure including our low-latency global fiber network right where your data is downloaded into our AWS Ground Station. 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 S3 to store the downloaded data, Amazon Kinesis Data Streams for managing data ingestion from satellites, SageMaker for building custom machine learning applications that apply to your data sets, and Amazon EC2 to command and download data from satellites. AWS Ground Station can help you save up to 80% on the cost of your ground station operations by allowing you to pay only for the actual antenna time used, and relying on our global footprint of ground stations to download data when and where you need it, instead of building and operating your own global ground station infrastructure. There are no long-term commitments, and you gain the ability to rapidly scale your satellite communications on-demand when your business needs it.