AWS Ground Station

https://aws.amazon.com/ground-station/

by shadeslayer • 5 years ago

99 37 5 years ago

aws.amazon.com

jdiez17• 5 years ago

I have been curious about this service for a while but the landing page is very scant on technical details about how it actually works.

- Is it an EC2 instance with an SDR attached? What’s the software setup? Is it compatible with GNUradio?

- What are the the antenna RX gain(s)?

- What TX power can be used?

Edit: I found this presentation [1] which has some additional details. It does seem to be SDR based but I can’t find public information about many of the parts/interfaces in the architecture diagrams.

Edit 2: There are a few more breadcrumbs of information on the AWS documentation site [2]. It sounds like the EC2 instance receives VITA-49 (?) packets from the RF front end and you need special software to process them.

[1] https://d1.awsstatic.com/events/reinvent/2019/REPEAT_1_Enabl...

[2] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ground-station/latest/ug/install...

RF_Savage• 5 years ago

Huh. VITA-49 kainda makes sense. It's the industrial/defence sides standardized format for transferring RF stuff as data.

All other solutions for streaming the data seem vendor specific to their hardware and software.

When AWS Ground Station launched I looked into their terms of service, hoping to be able to rent some time on their big dish to receive images from weather satellites. But no, you needed to own the satellite in question, not just have the keplerian elements for pointing at it and then demodulating the unencrypted, freely broadcast images from it. But no. Gota own the sat.

I wonder if that has changed.

But I can understand why. It's not like you want to run a SIGINT-As-A-Service platform that everybody with a credit card and maybe a Delaware corparation can use.

Lorin• 5 years ago

Wonder how they go about verifying you own the satellite in question...

chakspak• 5 years ago

Holy wow, it never occurred to me that there were enough organizations launching satellites to warrant creating a managed service to support it.

sydthrowaway• 5 years ago

There isn't. This is some VP's pet project .

duskwuff• 5 years ago

There's a lot of those around. For a sample, look at everything with "Deep" in its name (like AWS DeepCompose, DeepLens, and DeepRacer).

vineyardmike• 5 years ago

Its probably a commercialization of a tech they already had to create to handle project kuiper. Which is Bezos's pet project.

awsthro00945• 5 years ago

It's not that. Like most niche AWS services, this was likely the "pet project" of a major AWS customer that wanted something like this as part of a major business agreement [0]. And then after building it for that customer, AWS also expanded offering it to anyone else who wants to use it.

0: https://blog.maxar.com/earth-intelligence/2018/sending-data-... (posted the same day Ground Station was launched in 2018)

JCM9• 5 years ago

A big part of this service is AWS helping you navigate the paperwork minefield that is involved with beaming data down from space. You need agreements with the FCC equivalent in all the countries that you’ll be beaming data down to. After that you’re basically renting fractional time on Amazon’s equipment for sending and receiving data via a global network of ground stations.

On the space portion, companies often rent a partial payload on other satellites with a timeshare agreement for booting up their bits and using the antennas to beam things down/up.

ckdarby• 5 years ago

Why do I need the agreemnent? I would have figured that is what is being offered here, no? Like AWS Globlal Beaming Inc would have done all that and I would just be beaming data under their existing agreement and just complying, no?

techdragon3• 5 years ago

In my experience the communications related paperwork is a prerequisite for the paperwork to actually launch your satellite. Every single satellite (or constellation of identical satellites) has to have its own “internationally coordinated” set of paperwork, some of which may block you getting the information Amazon needs (depending on the regulatory environment of your country). The radio regulations are a real headache and from my own experience laser based communications can’t get here soon enough.

syedkarim• 5 years ago

I've spoken to someone in business development at AWS Ground Station in the past and have also navigated the ITU filing process for operating a satellite(s). I don't believe AWS does anything to reduce coordination requirements for downlinking from a satellite; I don't see how they could be at all involved with coordination.

AWS does eliminate the capex of setting up your own antennas all over the world. If you just want to downlink from your satellite, radiating into another country's borders is possible as long as that country did not object/request coordination with the satellite/ITU filing.

Some countries require receive-only earth stations (which is any antenna/terminal that receives a signal from a satellite) to be licensed, but many do not. AWS would eliminate that particular set of paperwork, but that's really not that much paperwork compared to ITU regulations.

hbcondo714• 5 years ago

This was released by AWS in 2018 with a lot of discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18546272

In contrast, Azure's orbital data is in "preview" in 2021 with little discussion:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=azure+orbital

naikrovek2• 5 years ago

yeah unfortunately this site has a lot of AWS fans and relatively few Azure fans.

it is fashionable to dislike Microsoft and has been for most of Microsoft's life.

ShamelessC• 5 years ago

Bit unprovoked wouldn't you say?

I don't see a lot of "fans" of specific cloud services. They are each flawed in different ways.

Microsoft gets bashed in the context of open source. In the context of running a cloud, I've only ever seen them praised for actually hiring customer support staff.

juliansimioni• 5 years ago

As an individual who certainly doesn't have any satellites in orbit and really doesn't have any space-specific skills beyond KSP, but who has enough money to blow on $10/minute fees, is there anything I could do with this?

Not illegal or nefarious things either, but could I do something like listen in on data being transmitted down by an existing satellite (say something like Hubble or Landsat that will eventually result in public data anyway)?

bellatrix21• 5 years ago

This AWS blog post does something like that: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/earth-observation-...

kochie• 5 years ago

Absolutely, so it’s possible to connect to weather satellites like NOAA-20 and Aqua and pull down the data from them as they pass. Check out the CloudFormation templates to get started. 1. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ground-station/latest/ug/custome... 2. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ground-station/latest/ug/choose-...

solarkraft• 5 years ago

A limited version is actually possible with relatively cheap components: https://youtu.be/cjClTnZ4Xh4

rosndo• 5 years ago

Not illegal or nefarious things either

Well, now I’d love to know about exciting illegal things one could theoretically do with this.

Maybe pop a root shell on a satellite and have the coolest bouncer on efnet?

Maybe you could spy on satphones? But I guess AWS would be prohibitively expensive for that.

synaesthesisx• 5 years ago

There are quite a few unique applications for geospatial data (imagery especially) that can return quite a high ROI to the right parties.

ackbar03• 5 years ago

care to name a few examples? The upfront costs associated seems non-trivial

kristjansson• 5 years ago

I’m sure OP has better examples, but ‘alternative data’ products offered to hedge funds estimating retail/industrial vehicle traffic come to mind

elkos2• 5 years ago

If you are interested in an open-source satellite ground-station network feel free to check Libre Space Foundation's(https:libre.space) SatNOGS (https://satnogs.org) network. There are more than 370+ ground-stations participating in the network (https://network.satnogs.org) you can even build your own on your backyard or rooftop (check the docs(https://wiki.satnogs.org)) and there is an interactive dashboard (https://dashboard.satnogs.org) (powered by Grafana).

disclaimer: I'm involved in SatNOGS and Libre Space Foundation since the very beginning

Debug_Overload• 5 years ago

I didn't know an open source project like this existed, it's awesome. Thanks for sharing.

How does it compare to the closed-source/proprietary alternatives?

elkos2• 5 years ago

In a nutshell SatNOGS is focused on publicly available transmission data either from radio amateur, experimental or meteorological satellites.

Ground-stations are operated by individuals organizations, or corporations using existing antenna systems (from simple static quadrafilar antennas to large radiotelescopes) and SDRs.

All data are publicly available for all. That can be very useful for example for experimental university cubesats teams that have a hard time receiving their own satellites.

Proprietary solutions focus usually on building their own hardware infrastructure instead of crowdfunding it. The data are by default available only to the operators of the satellites, they incorporate several pricing schemes.

Needless to say that SatNOGS caters very different needs than such proprietary networks.

AWS Ground Station

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