Amazon Web Services Announces
AWS Ground Station
November 27, 2018
Amazon Web Services, Inc. announced
AWS Ground Station, a new service that makes it easy and
cost-effective for customers to download data from
satellites into AWS Global Infrastructure Regions using
a fully managed network of 12 ground station antennas
located around the world. Once customers receive
satellite data at a ground station, they can immediately
process it 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. Getting
started with AWS Ground Station takes just a few clicks
in the AWS Management Console to schedule antenna access
time and launch an Amazon EC2 instance to communicate
with the satellite. 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. To get started with AWS Ground
Station, visit https://aws.amazon.com/ground-station.
Satellites are being used by more
and more businesses, universities, and governments for a
variety of applications, including weather forecasting,
surface imaging, and communications. To do this today,
customers must build or lease ground antennas to
communicate with the satellites. This is a significant
undertaking and cost because customers often require
antennas in multiple countries to download data when and
where they need it without waiting for the satellite to
pass over a desired location. And the antennas are just
the beginning of the infrastructure requirements because
customers need servers, storage, and networking in close
proximity to the antenna to process, store, and
transport the data from the satellite. And then
customers must build business rules and workflows to
organize, structure, and route the data to employees or
customers before it can be used to deliver insight. All
of this requires significant capital investments and
operational costs to build, manage, and maintain
antennas, compute infrastructure, and business logic at
each antenna location.
AWS Ground Station allows customers
to more easily and cost-effectively control satellite
operations, ingest satellite data, and integrate the
data with applications and other cloud services running
in AWS. Using AWS Ground Station, customers can 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 when and where they need it. The
recency of data is particularly critical when it comes
to tracking and acting upon fast-moving conditions on
the ground. This timeliness depends on frequent
communications between ground stations and satellites,
which can only be achieved with a large, global
footprint of antennas maintaining frequent contact with
orbiting satellites. For example, as fast-moving
environmental, geopolitical, or news events unfold on
the ground, AWS Ground Station customers can downlink
current data to any of the 12 AWS ground stations around
the world and quickly combine the data with other AWS
services to process, store, analyze, and transport the
data to keep up with rapidly evolving conditions. With
AWS and AWS Ground Station, customers can get timely
data sooner, rapidly experiment with new applications,
and deliver products to market faster without buying,
leasing, or maintaining complex and expensive
infrastructure.
“Satellite data is incredibly
useful for building a wide range of important
applications, but it is super complex and expensive to
build and operate the infrastructure needed to do so. A
few years back our customers asked us if we could remove
that cost and complexity, and the more we thought about
it, the more we realized that AWS with its global
footprint was uniquely positioned to solve this
challenge,” said Charlie Bell, Senior Vice President of
AWS. “Today, we are giving satellite customers the
ability to dynamically scale their ground station
antenna use based on actual need. And, they will be able
to ingest data straight into AWS, where they can
securely store, analyze, and transmit products to their
customers without needing to worry about building all of
the infrastructure themselves.”
AWS Ground Station’s self-service
graphical interface makes it easy to identify antenna
locations and communications windows, and schedule
antenna time. This enables customers to review confirmed
times in the console and cancel or reschedule prior to
the scheduled contact time. Because many AWS Ground
Station antennas are co-located with AWS Regions,
customers have low-latency, local access to other AWS
services to process and store this data. For example,
they can use Amazon EC2 to control satellites and
downlink data, store and share the data in Amazon
Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Elastic File
System (Amazon EFS), or Amazon S3, use Amazon Virtual
Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) for secure communications
between Amazon EC2 instances and the AWS Ground Station
antenna gateway, hunt for real-time business insights
with Amazon Kinesis Data Streams and Amazon Elastic Map
Reduce, 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 IoT
Greengrass. AWS customers can combine these capabilities
to build exciting applications that might use image
recognition to identify and protect endangered animals,
machine learning to predict faulty construction or
industrial systems, or analytics to estimate oil
production or assess agriculture yields in real time.
DigitalGlobe is the world’s leading
provider of high-resolution Earth imagery, data and
analysis. “At DigitalGlobe, a Maxar Technologies
company, we employ AWS Ground Station to augment the
capabilities of our global network of ground station
antennas. With greater connectivity to DigitalGlobe’s
high-resolution constellation and more downlink
capacity, our collection planning 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. “Partnering with the AWS team to help form
AWS Ground Station has also opened exciting business
innovations for our company and our customers. We
simplify the task of streaming DigitalGlobe’s
industry-leading satellite imagery from space to our
Geospatial Big Data platform (GBDX) for industry-leading
applications such as AWS-native machine learning
analysis, while at the same time eliminating multiple
process steps, saving money and providing timely
actionable information for our customers to make
decisions with confidence.”
BlackSky’s global monitoring and
alerting services provide an easy, affordable way to
observe, analyze, and act on timely and relevant
insights about the planet. “Working with AWS to
incorporate the AWS Ground Station product into our
ground architecture has provided BlackSky with a new
view into AWS innovation,” said Nick Merski, Vice
President of Space Operations, BlackSky/Spaceflight
Industries. “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. This
product seamlessly integrates with our AWS hosted
architecture, enhancing BlackSky’s ability to deliver an
unprecedented level of service to our customers.”
Spire Global Inc. is a space to
cloud analytics company that utilizes proprietary
satellite data and algorithms to provide maritime,
aviation, and weather tracking. “We are excited to see
AWS enter the space services market with the new and
game-changing ground station services approach of AWS
Ground Station,” said Jeroen Cappaert, CTO & Co-Founder,
Spire Global Inc. “The world’s weather, ships, and
planes don’t wait for us to down-link our data so a
diverse global footprint is key. The prospect of using
AWS Ground Station to quickly scale the depth of our
ground station network on the fly gives us more time to
focus on delivering our products to customers. Providing
machine learning based technologies like ship location
prediction and advanced weather data require intense
scalable data processing and storage. By giving ground
stations direct access to AWS, we can build on the ways
in which we already leverage cloud services for our
compute and processing needs.”
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