AWS Ground Station Features

AWS Ground Station antennas are located within fully managed AWS locations and are interconnected via Amazon’s low-latency, highly reliable, scalable and secure global network backbone. As a result, downlinked data is synchronously delivered to an AWS Region and can be sent to other AWS Regions over the global network.

After onboarding your satellite to AWS Ground Station, you can easily schedule contacts with your satellite. Simply access the AWS Management Console via AWS Ground Station, and just select your satellite, a start and end time, and the preferred ground station location. After scheduling your Contact, you launch Amazon EC2 instances to send satellite commands or receive telemetry and/or mission data. When sending satellite commands, an EC2 instance communicates over an elastic network interface (ENI) connection in Amazon VPC for the duration of the contact. Received telemetry and/or mission data is delivered to EC2 or Lambda for real-time processing or stored in an Amazon S3 bucket for asynchronous processing.

AWS Ground Station antenna locations provide direct access to AWS services for faster, simpler and more cost-effective storage and processing of downloaded data. This allows you to reduce data processing and analysis times for use cases like weather prediction or natural disaster imagery from hours to minutes or seconds. This also enables you to quickly create business rules and workflows to organize, structure, route the satellite data before it can be analyzed and incorporated into key applications such as imaging analysis and weather forecasting. Some of the key AWS services include Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon VPC, Amazon Rekognition, Amazon SageMaker, and Amazon Kinesis Data Streams.

You can use AWS Ground Station to connect with satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) operating in X-band and S-band frequencies, including: S-band uplink (2025-2120 MHz) and downlink (2200-2300 MHz), X-band narrowband and wideband downlink (7750-8400 MHz).

Wideband DigIF allows you to build a global ground segment by centralizing their software-defined radios (SDRs) in a separate AWS Region. AWS Ground Station leverages Wideband Digital Intermediate Frequency (DigIF) to let you downlink up to five channels (400 MHz total) per polarity. This feature delivers VITA-49.2 data across AWS’s low-latency, high bandwidth global network into a satellite operator’s Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Data is delivered to either an Amazon EC2 for real-time processing or an Amazon S3 for asynchronous processing.  

You can use the AWS Management Console or AWS Ground Station APIs to reserve contacts and antenna time for your satellite communications. With AWS Ground Station’s console or APIs, you can review, cancel, and reschedule contact reservations up to 15 minutes prior to scheduled antenna times.

Once you complete all licensing and onboard your satellite, you can schedule access to AWS Ground Station antennas on a per-minute basis and pay only for the scheduled time, using On-Demand or Reserved pricing. On-Demand pricing lets you pay for antenna access with no long-term commitments; whereas, Reserved pricing provides a discounted rate and improved scheduling window, compared to On-Demand, with a monthly commitment.

With AWS Ground Station digital twin, you can verify compatibility between your mission planning software and AWS Ground Station's scheduling service without needing to wait for spectrum licensing approvals or coordinate testing with publicly available antenna capacity. An AWS Ground Station digital twin emits the same Amazon EventBridge events and API responses as the production service, allowing you to fine tune their configurations and dataflow endpoint groups.

The digital twin feature for AWS Ground Station provides you with virtualized ground station infrastructure for space-to-ground compatibility testing. Once onboarded to the feature, you can begin integration and testing using simulated spacecraft and antennas. With AWS Ground Station Digital Twin, you can verify compatibility between your mission planning software and AWS Ground Station's scheduling service without needing to wait for spectrum licensing approvals or coordinate testing with publicly available antenna capacity. Digital Twin emits the same Amazon EventBridge events and API responses as the production service, allowing you to fine tune their configurations and dataflow endpoint groups.