AWS Announces General Availability of AWS Ground Station

With a network of satellite ground stations located in close
proximity to AWS Regions around the world customers can download,
process, store, analyze, and act upon satellite data quicker with
substantial cost savings

Capella Space, D-Orbit, Maxar Technologies, Myriota, NSLComm, Open
Cosmos, Spire, and Thales Alenia Space are among customers and partners
using AWS Ground Station

SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company
(NASDAQ:AMZN), announced the general availability of AWS Ground Station,
a new service that makes it easy and cost-effective for customers to
control satellites from AWS and download data from satellites into AWS
Global Infrastructure Regions using a fully managed network of ground
station antennas located around the world. Once customers upload
satellite commands and data through AWS Ground Station, they can quickly
download large amounts of data over the high-speed AWS Ground Station
network, immediately process it in an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
(Amazon EC2) instance, store it in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon
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 value. This
requires significant capital investments and operational costs to build,
manage, and securely 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 growing global footprint of ground
stations to downlink data when and where they need it. These ground
stations are also located in close proximity to AWS Regions around the
world, so customers can store, process, and analyze the data locally,
rapidly gain insights, and then quickly take action. 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 AWS ground stations around the world. 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 antennas and infrastructure.

“Satellite data offers customers a profound way to build applications
that help humans explore space and improve life on Earth, but the cost
and difficulty of building and maintaining the infrastructure necessary
to downlink and process the data has historically been prohibitive for
all but the most well-funded organizations,” says Shayn Hawthorne,
General Manager, AWS Ground Station. “The goal of AWS Ground Station is
to make space communications ubiquitous and to make ground stations
simple and easy to use, so that more organizations can derive insights
from satellite data to help improve life on Earth and embark on deeper
exploration and discovery in space. Customers can rely on AWS Ground
Station’s global footprint to downlink data when and where they need it,
get timely data, and build new applications faster based on readily
available satellite data, without having to buy, lease, and maintain
complex and expensive infrastructure.”

AWS Ground Station’s self-service graphical interface makes it easy to
identify downlink opportunities, 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 AWS Ground Station antennas are located in close proximity to
AWS Regions, customers have low-latency, local access to other AWS
services to process and store 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 Ground
Station is available immediately in US East (Ohio) and US West (Oregon)
and will expand to additional regions and locations in the coming year.

Maxar Technologies, operator of the high-resolution, high-accuracy
WorldView imaging constellation, is preparing for the launch of its
next-generation satellite constellation, WorldView Legion, in 2021. “The
addition of WorldView Legion enables us to image the most rapidly
changing areas on Earth more than 15 times per day and triple our
capacity to collect 30 cm resolution imagery,” said Dr. Walter Scott,
Maxar’s Chief Technology Officer. “AWS Ground Station will provide us
with more opportunities and capacity to downlink and analyze the large
amount of data WorldView Legion will be sending back to Earth, enabling
us to extract insights from the data for our customers when and where it
matters.”

Thales Alenia Space, drawing on more than 40 years of experience and a
unique combination of skills, expertise and cultures, delivers
cost-effective solutions for telecommunications, navigation, Earth
observation, environmental management, exploration, science and orbital
infrastructures. Governments and private industry alike count on Thales
Alenia Space to design satellite-based systems that provide anytime,
anywhere connections and positioning, monitor Earth, enhance management
of its resources, and explore our Solar System and beyond. Thales Alenia
Space is excited to collaborate with AWS to expand its New Space leading
technologies to address the ground segment, including providing
additional tools and features for AWS Ground Station customers. “We
integrate our innovative leading space technologies with the ones from
partners within our ecosystem, such as AWS Ground Station, to help
customers optimize the use of our planet’s – and our solar system’s –
resources and to help build a better, more sustainable life on Earth,”
said Viktoria Otero del Val, SVP Strategy, M&A and New Business
Initiatives at Thales Alenia Space.

Myriota is a satellite IoT connectivity provider that enables customers
to send small messages at ultra-low cost from anywhere on Earth. By
securely delivering data direct to a constellation of low Earth orbit
nanosatellites, Myriota’s unique patented and proven technology provides
IoT connectivity in locations where terrestrial providers cannot
operate, including oceans and the Australian outback. As an AWS Partner,
Myriota is already using AWS for its processing and cloud-based
delivery. “With massive scale, long battery life, and direct-to-orbit
connectivity for IoT, Myriota is helping customers with vital
applications, such as sensor telemetry, low-value asset tracking, and
device monitoring and control,” said Dr. David Haley, Chief Technology
Officer for Myriota. “The AWS Ground Station Network provides an
exciting opportunity to further increase operational efficiency and
reliability for our customers at massive scale.”

Capella Space is an information services company providing on-demand
Earth observation data via advanced space radar. Capella provides
persistent, reliable, and affordable products and services through its
constellation of 36 high-resolution, high-capacity Synthetic Aperture
Radar (SAR) satellites, which can see through clouds and at
night, permitting imaging during bad weather or low light conditions.
“We’re entering a new era of Earth observation, with near real-time
access to our changing world at our fingertips,” said Payam Banazadeh,
CEO of Capella Space. “Providing low-latency and actionable information
from space is going to change how industries utilize space. We are
excited to be collaborating with Amazon on AWS Ground Station along with
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and Amazon Rekognition to
provide persistent satellite monitoring, closing coverage gaps and
delivering data that can save lives and protect our planet.”

NSLComm helps lower size, weight, and power barriers for nanosatellite
launches. NSLComm designs and manufactures space-qualified antennas
that, once in space, unfold like parachutes to 10 times their original
size, offering customers significantly more processing power and higher
throughput than other small satellites. The small footprint and high
throughput of NSLComm antennas reduce overall satellite launch load
costs, increase transmission precision and power, and lower satellite
data transmission price. “NSLComm’s aspiration is to make nanosatellite
communications more affordable. Low-cost, high-speed satellite
communications can help provide, for example, better in-flight
connectivity. NSLComm antennas open a wide array of new applications in
the space market,” said Dr. Raz Itzhaki, founder and CEO of NSLComm. “We
are already collaborating with AWS by integrating NSLSat-1 and NSLComm
constellation design with AWS Ground Station services to provide more
affordable satellite control and telemetry to our customers.”

D-Orbit’s core service is InOrbit NOW, a large-scale, space
transportation service that delivers CubeSats into precise orbital
slots, using ION CubeSat Carrier, a sort of cargo vehicle developed and
operated by the company. Instead of simply unpacking a batch of CubeSats
in bulk into a single region of Earth’s orbit, ION CubeSat Carrier moves
across orbits, depending on the operational requirements, and delivers
each small satellite precisely where it is supposed to go. The company
also offers a space control platform that supports the activities of
ground control teams for multi-spacecraft satellite missions. D-Orbit is
committed to promoting a positive environmental space impact, reducing
the threat of space debris to Earth, and to opening space to a wide
variety of business opportunities. “At D-Orbit, we aim at preserving a
profitable and sustainable space environment to meet the needs of our
customers, while making space safer for everyone,” said Luca Rossettini,
D-Orbit’s CEO. “Our collaboration with AWS Ground Station, a remarkably
flexible and scalable platform, is an essential element in our roadmap
towards a space logistics infrastructure.”

Open Cosmos provides simple and affordable small satellite missions to
help solve the world’s biggest challenges and this enables organizations
from across a wide range of industries to use space technologies as a
tool. Open Cosmos removes barriers to space access by simplifying the
technology, offering a one-stop-shop to orbit, and reducing both time
and cost. Open Cosmos offers payload development and qualification
services, provides end-to-end space missions, constellation services,
and in-orbit demonstration services. “At Open Cosmos, we are working
hard to disrupt the way the space industry operates and to open up this
technology so people can truly engage in having a global impact,” said
Rafael Jordá Siquier, CEO and Founder of Open Cosmos. “Whether it is a
local government agency wanting to predict where the next wildfire might
break out, an NGO wanting to deliver humanitarian aid, or a telecoms
company launching a service in a remote area, our customers are having
an immediate global impact with our solutions. AWS Ground Station is
perfectly aligned with our mission as it helps us enable our customers
to scale without any additional CAPEX or OPEX investments so that they
can focus on innovation and speed instead of operational planning.”

Spire Global Inc. is a data and analytics company that collects data
from space to solve problems on Earth. Owning and operating one of the
largest satellite constellations in the world, Spire identifies, tracks,
and predicts the movement of the world’s resources and weather systems
so that businesses and governments can make smart decisions. “Spire has
witnessed a heightened awareness and an increasingly global need for
satellite-based, Earth-observation data for business, especially in the
fields of weather, maritime, and aviation,” said Peter Platzer, CEO,
Spire Global Inc. “The flexibility of AWS Ground Station gives Spire the
ability to satisfy that growing customer demand by flexibly augmenting
our own global ground network capabilities. With AWS we can
collaboratively build a platform for a new kind of data solution which
is rapidly becoming an industry standard.”

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