AWS Ground Station is a fully managed service that lets you control satellite communications, process data, and scale your operations without having to worry about building or managing your own ground station infrastructure. Satellites are used for a wide variety of use cases, including weather forecasting, surface imaging, communications, and video broadcasts. Ground stations form the core of global satellite networks.  With AWS Ground Station, you have direct access to AWS services and the AWS Global Infrastructure including a low-latency global fiber network. For example, you can use Amazon S3 to store the downloaded data, Amazon Kinesis Data Streams for managing data ingestion from satellites, Amazon SageMaker for building custom machine learning applications that apply to your data sets. You can save up to 80% on the cost of your ground station operations by paying only for the actual antenna time used, and relying on the global footprint of ground stations to download data when and where you need it. There are no long-term commitments, and you gain the ability to rapidly scale your satellite communications on-demand when your business needs it.

Introduction to AWS Ground Station

Natural disasters

During natural disasters you can rapidly analyze downlinked imagery data to identify survivors, assess structural damages, and rapidly stream this data to first responders and rescue teams. You can apply analytics and machine learning to this data to identify the safest exit routes and best locations for temporary shelters and emergency medical facilities.

Accurate weather prediction

You can use the AWS Cloud to analyze downlinked weather data from all over the world to more accurately predict weather patterns. This can be used to help ships, airplanes, trucks and people increase their awareness of inclement weather in their area and then safely and efficiently avoid dangerous situations.

Business trends assessment

You can use radar satellite imagery of your various business facilities such as parking lots, logistic centers, and retail stores to autonomously measure cars, traffic and customer flow patterns, even when it’s dark or cloudy weather conditions. You can combine this with other AWS services like analytics and machine learning, along with time of day and weather conditions, to assess business and operational trends in real-time. These insights can be rapidly streamed to relevant business analysts and decision makers anywhere in the world.

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