Amazon Enters Space Services Market with AWS Ground Station to Process Satellite data

Amazon has launched its AWS Ground Station cloud service to process Satellite data.

AWS Ground Station service allows downloading data from satellites into AWS Global Infrastructure Regions using a fully managed network of 12 ground station antennas located around the world.

Game Changer in Space Market

As technology has started advancing, Universities, businesses have started using satellites along with Governments. The use cases vary substantially including satellite imagery, weather forecasting, and military purposes.

However, in order to download, process, store, analyze the satellite data still a lot of upfront cost is involved. The immediate and upfront costs include,

1. Building or leasing ground antennas across multiple locations and geographies to download satellite data
2. Processing Satellite data, local provisioning needs to be made in terms of computes, storage and networking
3. Building business rules and workflows to organize, structure the data. Then route the same data to employees or customers before it can be used to deliver insight.

Amazon claims that AWS Ground Station is capable to reduce these costs bringing savings in terms of 80 percent. This can be achieved by on-demand access to the global footprint of AWS's ground station antennas to download data as required. Most of the time recency of the satellite data matters.

The announcement, said, "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."

Downloaded data at AWS's Ground Station can be processed on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance, stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), AWS analytics and machine learning services can be used to gain insights. Amazon’s network can further be used to transfer satellite data to other regions and processing facilities.

Executive & Early Partner Opinion:

Senior Vice President of AWS, Charlie Bell, said, “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. 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.”

DigitalGlobe is the world’s leading provider of high-resolution Earth imagery, data and analysis.

Chief Operations Officer, DigitalGlobe, Jeff Culwell, said, “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. 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.

Vice President of Space Operations, BlackSky/Spaceflight Industries, Nick Merski, said, “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.

CTO & Co-Founder, Spire Global Inc., Jeroen Cappaert, said, “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. 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.”

Access AWS Ground Station Services

AWS Ground Station is a self-serve graphical interface and will be available in AWS Management Console. It makes it easy to identify antenna locations and communications windows, and schedule antenna time. Most of the AWS Ground Station antennas are co-located with AWS regions to provide low-latency with other AWS services involving big-data, IoT technologies.

DigitalGlobe, BlackSky, Spire, Capella Space, Open Cosmos, and HawkEye 360 are engaged initially to access antennas on demand.

The AWS Ground station service can be accessed here.