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re:Invent :: AWS Ground Station downs satellite cost
A network of 12 antenna ground stations in AWS Regions around the world will make data more versatile.
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.
“We employ AWS Ground Station to augment the capabilities of our global network of ground station antennas,” said Jeff Culwell, Chief Operations Officer, DigitalGlobe. “With greater connectivity to DigitalGlobe’s high-resolution constellation and more downlink capacity, our collection planning teams can now optimise the interval from planning to image collection, downlink, and analysis – especially valuable when time matters. 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, analyse, and act on timely and relevant insights about the planet. Said Nick Merski, Vice President of Space Operations, BlackSky/Spaceflight Industrie,.“Working with AWS to incorporate the AWS Ground Station product into our ground architecture has provided BlackSky with a new view into AWS innovation. 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.”
