AWS launches AWS Ground Station
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AWS launches AWS Ground Station

Satellite network.jpeg

Amazon Web Services has announced the general availability of AWS Ground Station, a new service that allows customers to control satellites from AWS.

In addition, customers are able to download data from those satellites into AWS Infrastructure Regions using a managed network of ground station antennas worldwide.

“Satellite data offers customers a profound way to build applications that help humans explore space and improve life on Earth, but the cost and difficulty of building and maintaining the infrastructure necessary to downlink and process the data has historically been prohibitive for all but the most well-funded organisations,” said Shayn Hawthorne, general manager of AWS Ground Station.

Once customers have uploaded satellite commands and data through AWS Ground Station, they can download large amounts of data over the high-speed AWS Ground Station network. After, the can immediately process it in an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instance, store it in Amazon Simple Storage Service, apply AWS analytics and machine learning services to gain insights, and use Amazon’s network to move the data to other regions and processing facilities.

“The goal of AWS Ground Station is to make space communications ubiquitous and to make ground stations simple and easy to use, so that more organisations can derive insights from satellite data to help improve life on Earth and embark on deeper exploration and discovery in space,” adds Hawthorne. “Customers can rely on AWS Ground Station’s global footprint to downlink data when and where they need it, get timely data, and build new applications faster based on readily available satellite data, without having to buy, lease, and maintain complex and expensive infrastructure.”

Using AWS Ground Station saves customers up to 80% of their ground station costs by paying for antenna access time on-demand and they can rely on AWS Ground Station’s growing global footprint of ground stations to downlink data when and where they need it.

Earlier this month, Epsilon achieved the AWS Service Delivery designation for AWS Direct Connect. This accreditation acknowledges that that Epsilon is authorised to provision AWS Direct Connect Hosted Connections capabilities greater than 500Mbps.

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