Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched a pay-per-use service — AWS Ground Station — that enables companies to access data from satellites and build different applications. The Amazon.com company has termed the services as the world’s first “fully-managed ground station as-a-service”.
The services will start with a network of 12 ground station antennae in AWS Regions (similar to data centres) around the world, enabling customers to download, process, store and analyse data. Apart from easier access to data, the service will also help reduce costs by up to 80 per cent.
“You first need a number of antennas for ground stations, placed world-wide. To uplink and downlink the data, you have to write all kinds of business logic, scripts and workflows. To take the data and do something with it, you need some kind of infrastructure,” AWS Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy said at the re:Invent here.
AWS re:Invent is an annual conference for the global cloud computing community.
Ground stations are used by satellite operators to communicate with satellites using specialised antennas, computing network and other infrastructure.
“Storage, processing and analytics on top of it, have their benefits, but all of these things are difficult for customers. And it is also expensive,” he said, adding “space is hard, and getting data to and from orbiting satellites can be even harder.”
Work Plan
The company will start with two ground stations this week, with plans to have 12 stations in operation by the middle of next year. At present, there are about 2,000 satellites orbiting the earth, which is expected to rise to about 16,000 in the next 10 years.
AWS Ground Station has partnered with several satellite companies such as Lockheed Martin, Capella Space, Spire Global, DigitalGlobe and BlackSky. The company will be using Lockheed Martin’s low-cost, ground-based antennas to capture satellite data.
AWS will use Lockheed Martin’s new Verge antenna network for the new service, which will help customers download data from multiple satellites at the same time, Rick Ambrose, Executive Vice-President of Lockheed Martin, said.
AWS also launched AWS RoboMaker, a service that enables developers to develop, test and deploy robotics applications and build intelligent robotics functions using cloud services.