Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the AWS Ground Station and revealed that initial customers DigitalGlobe, BlackSky, Spire, Capella Space, Open Cosmos, and HawkEye 360 will use it.
AWS Ground Station – announced at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas – has a network of 12 antenna ground stations in AWS Regions around the world that can be used by customers to download, process, store, analyze, and act upon satellite data with cost savings.
Customers can download data from satellites into AWS Global Infrastructure Regions using a managed network of 12 ground station antennas.
Customers can process satellite data in an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance, store it in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), apply AWS analytics and machine learning services to gain insights, and use Amazon’s network to move the data to other regions and processing facilities.
Customers will gain as there are no up-front payments or long-term commitments, no ground infrastructure to build or manage, and customers pay-by-the-minute for antenna access time used.
Customer can start AWS Ground Station in a few clicks in the AWS Management Console to schedule antenna access time and launch an Amazon EC2 instance to communicate with the satellite.
AWS Ground Station enables customers to save up to 80 percent of their ground station costs by paying for antenna access time on demand, and they can rely on AWS Ground Station’s global footprint of ground stations to downlink data.
AWS Ground Station customers can downlink data to any of the 12 AWS ground stations and combine the data with other AWS services to process, store, analyze, and transport the data to keep up with rapidly evolving conditions.
“We are giving satellite customers the ability to scale their ground station antenna use based on actual need,” Charlie Bell, senior vice president of AWS, said.
DigitalGlobe, a Maxar Technologies company, employs AWS Ground Station to augment the capabilities of global network of ground station antennas.
“With connectivity to DigitalGlobe’s constellation and downlink capacity, teams can now optimize the interval from planning to image collection, downlink, and analysis – especially valuable when time matters,” said Jeff Culwell, chief operations officer, DigitalGlobe.
BlackSky supplies monitoring, and alerting services and relevant insights about the planet.
“AWS listened to our inputs on price point and took into account our needs to influence the timing and approach to their service baseline. AWS Ground Station provides important growth and scalability for a global, self-service ground station-as-a-service,” Nick Merski, vice president of Space Operations, BlackSky/Spaceflight Industries, said.
Spire Global is a cloud analytics company that utilizes satellite data and algorithms to provide maritime, aviation, and weather tracking.
“The prospect of using AWS Ground Station to scale the depth of our ground station network gives us more time to focus on delivering our products to customers,” Jeroen Cappaert, CTO and co-founder of Spire Global, said.
