
AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites - leef
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-ground-station-ingest-and-process-data-from-orbiting-satellites/
======
patrickyeon
I'm... not convinced this is a decent offering. At the same time, I'm
repeatedly wrong with this whole cloud computing, so maybe I'm just that
person stuck with the old ways and telling everyone else they're doing it
wrong.

But it seems like a recipe that combines so many of the worst parts of running
a groundstation. The setup can't easily be specialized enough to really milk
capability (say, different ways to correct pointing and orbit determination
errors that need more direct control of the antenna than just feeding a TLE),
but it's likely so general that there's still significant engineering effort
for anybody who wants to use it. If you want to do anything requiring round-
trips to the satellite, where you need to ship raw radio signals to a DC,
process them in software to demodulate and decode, then encode and modulate
your responce before shipping it back as raw radio signals to the
groundstation, sorry but that latency is painful and hurts you on link
utilization.

In comparison, buying a small turn-key dish and operating it is not that bad.
Paying per-minute or per-pass gets really expensive for smallsat/cubesat
operators, at least at the usual prices I've seen and compared to the
operating cost of equipment you own. Also, if you're just running a tech demo
then it's not exactly prohibitive to partner with somebody who has excess
capacity.

I think this offering is missing the mark. If I had to make an analogy, I'd
say they're offering roughly "GCP for downlink" to a world that's not quite
homogeneous enough for it to make sense. If I were trying to do this, I'd be
aiming to be the "Squarespace of downlink" (more tightly scoped capabilities,
but much better performance and more turn-key) or someone delivering
groundstation-in-a-box kits.

Context: I used to work at Planet Labs, having spent considerable time
collaborating with the groundstations team, as well as some collaboration with
the missions ops team.

~~~
ricardobeat
Is buying a 'turn-key' dish going to be easier than using their service? I
assume the 'can't easily be specialized enough to really milk capability' part
also applies to the off-the-shelf system (disclaimer: I know zilch about
this).

They say it's going to save at least 80% over the cost of operating your own,
can only assume they will price it very competitively and have done the math.
Hard to say anything without seeing numbers.

~~~
patrickyeon
You're absolutely right that it depends on pricing, assuming what they offer
has the technical capabilities to do what a customer needs. But how they
calculate that 80% matters too, and if it's measured against a more
"traditional" groundstation contract I'd say that's also being misleading.

I've seen new turn-key installations come with an equivalent UI and an API to
match it. Plus a bunch of debugging/calibration/testing controls. And then
(assuming licensing, real estate, and services availability) you get to drop
that "anywhere" and optimize its geographical location to match up with your
system requirements.

Turn-key systems will totally let you specialize it to maximize utility.
Selection of RF feeds/hardware on the input side, and eg. hardware data modems
and co-located command-and-control servers on the output side.

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jeletonskelly
Imagine Amazon building and launching satellites like space based data
centers. AWS in orbit. You could provision VMs on a satellite equipped with an
array of general sensors, cameras, etc.

~~~
liotier
Considering the difficulty of dumping heat in a vacuum and the cost of
orbiting huge heat exchangers, I wager that heavy computing shall remain a
mostly planetary activity for quite a while longer.

~~~
tachion
Isn't rather chilly space a great cooler for anything that heats up?

~~~
sek
In simple terms space it not chilly but vacuum, so the heat can't go anywhere.

~~~
MichaelApproved
It's not that heat can't _go_ anywhere, it's that there's nothing to _carry_
heat away.

On Earth, air molecules can carry heat away from you. You transfer heat to the
air around you. In space, there is almost no matter around you to absorb the
heat and carry it away from you.

Your only option is to radiate heat away from you in the form of infrared
light but that is a slow process.

~~~
Ensorceled
> It's not that heat can't go anywhere, it's that there's nothing to carry
> heat away

So ... the heat stays put and doesn’t go anywhere?

~~~
CamTin
It doesn't go anywhere except by radiation, which sucks as a way to cool
things compared to conduction.

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cjg_
Sounds like this was built for DigitalGlobe (announced last year they are
going all in on AWS and moved ~100PB library into AWS). Satellite directly to
S3 sounds perfect for them.

~~~
X-Cubed
Yeah, they posted this on their blog today:
[http://blog.digitalglobe.com/industry/sending-data-from-
spac...](http://blog.digitalglobe.com/industry/sending-data-from-space-to-
amazon-s3-in-less-than-a-minute/)

~~~
cjg_
Impressive! Image capture to s3 in 55 seconds!

------
cgoecknerwald
Seems somewhat similar to what Descartes Labs is doing - a "data refinery that
combines data from diverse sources, cleans it up and makes it ready for
modeling - and a platform to upon which to build living, learning models" [1]

[1] [https://www.descarteslabs.com/](https://www.descarteslabs.com/)

~~~
philosophygeek
I'm the CEO of Descartes Labs. It's indeed true that we've built a data
refinery that ingests lots and lots of satellite data. The data refinery can
be seen as a two-sided marketplace. On one side, we form partnerships with
satellite and other geospatial data companies (in addition to open source data
from NASA, ESA,and others) and pull in all of that data. On the other side,
scientists can run computations over huge amounts of data from multiple
datasets. For now, most of our business has been done on the scientist side.
In principle, we could provide our infrastructure to satellite companies so
they don't have to build out the software on their own. Most hardware
companies suck at being software companies.

Amazon's offering is geared more towards ground stations, but they might move
up the stack and start providing data refinery-type services on top of the
ground station work.

Oh, our entire stack is built on Google Cloud Platform.

~~~
choppaface
Can you give an example of "refined" data versus what one might get through
the AWS product? ... in order to demonstrate the sort of tech skills and
effort that differentiate the two. I'm basically hoping for some symbol
grounding for "data refinery".

Also, what's the TAM in your specific market vs the AWS product's market? How
has the TAM changed in the past 5 years?

Lastly, I heard your head of engineering brews better beer than any of your
competitors. Is that true? Can be provide samples?

~~~
zeptomu
Refined data probably means getting insights from the vast amount of aerial
imagery (and related like SAR or elevation model) data that has become
available in recent years. Having access to the data is one thing (e.g.
Landsat and Sentinel provided by Google, Amazon and other parties), but
processing it efficiently is still non-trivial.

Examples include Land-Cover-Mapping (mapping pixels to classes like forests,
urban areas, water, etc.) which can then further be used to do crop monitoring
or land-use monitoring.

I guess this is different than the product AWS is offering here, which is more
about getting the data from/to the satellite, but not about processing (at
least for now).

~~~
brootstrap
Yeah these are classic examples of 'providing business value'. Want to be an
agricultural tech company? Ingest some satellite data and calculate NDVI, boom
you now know machine learning, data science, and have created a great business
product that helps save the world by making farmers better.

Satellite data imo sucks, especially aerial imagery. Too many damn clouds to
get anything useful in real time haha!

------
_wmd
Identify high yield market, commoditize, everyone benefits, except the old
school and their previously captive audience and mandatory long-term
commitments. Sound familiar?

I wonder if the same principle could work for telescopes, or are radio
telescope designs far too specialized to be a commodity? Huge installations
funded in spite political boundaries might be possible in such a scenario

~~~
pilsetnieks
Maybe they're setting up for customers like SpaceX and the like, with
potentially huge satellite arrays.

~~~
wmf
I would predict the opposite. If you have 4,000 satellites you can justify
ground stations but if you have one cubesat you might prefer to rent by the
minute.

~~~
toomuchtodo
If you have one cubesat, you'll probably use Starlink (once operational)
instead of your own ground station.

~~~
gpm
Is starlink going to work for third party satellite communication? Somehow I
assumed that the antennas would be directional towards earth. Also the
proposed ground stations are said to be pizza box sized, a bit large for a
cubesat if they can't be miniaturized.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Good question. I reached out to a contact at SpaceX to get more info.

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fuddle
I feel this is an early part of Jeff Bezos's plan to build out the
infrastructure needed for space exploration, as he once did to power the Web
with AWS.

------
deckarep
I think there’s going to be an API for everything renissance and this is just
another example. As a coder being able to automate all the things and create
new businesses, processes, workflows it’s a great time to be a coder.

Aka reaching beyond the cloud.

~~~
ryanmarsh
Did you mean "there’s going to be an API for everything reconnaissance"?

~~~
philwelch
I can see how you might have parsed it that way, but I think he meant "(API
for everything) renaissance" rather than "API for (everything renaissance)"
(which makes a lot more sense if it was an API that related to 16th century
paintings or something).

~~~
jakear
Honestly an API for (everything Renaissance) would be fun to play with. I’m
imagining influencer relations, student/teacher relations, etc.

------
dr_orpheus
ViaSat is also trying to do something similar with a "pay by the minutes"
usage for their groundstations and communication satellites. Although the main
goal for the ViaSat project is continuous coverage so that you can get data
from satellites in near real-time.

[https://www.viasat.com/sites/default/files/media/documents/v...](https://www.viasat.com/sites/default/files/media/documents/viasat_real-
time_earth_brochure.pdf)

------
davidstoker
Very cool! Now if only I had a satellite to use it with...

How much demand would there be for this type of offering?

~~~
cbanek
I guess the idea is that if the connection weren't encrypted you could listen
to anything out there (like satellites used for transmitting weather
information to ships at sea).

~~~
tzakrajs
There is a fairly narrow cone you would need to be in to intercept the data
but if its intelligence related then it’s definitely encrypted thanks to
export laws. ITAR and EAR [https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/policy-
guidance/encryption](https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/policy-
guidance/encryption)

~~~
cbanek
Some might be encrypted, but I don't think they are all encrypted:

[https://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-tutorial-receiving-noaa-
weat...](https://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-tutorial-receiving-noaa-weather-
satellite-images/)

Usually the export laws and restrictions (ITAR) refer to the technology used
to launch the satellites, not the data they downlink.

But if you had the key, you could also use encrypted satellite data.

(Edit note: the parent changed their text to say intelligence data, which is
obviously not what I was talking about)

~~~
dr_orpheus
The ITAR laws can also refer to data. A lot of the data coming from the ITAR
restricted technology is also ITAR controlled because in theory you can
inference something about how it works based on the data that is coming from
it. This is typically true of data coming from spacecraft payloads or new
technology.

Encryption is still not necessarily required, unless you are landing the
signal only on a groundstation in the United States.

AWS can handle ITAR controlled data though. They already have the AWS GovCloud
for data subjet to ITAR restrictions.

~~~
cbanek
Yes, ITAR also relates to plans, schematics, software, data, all sorts of
things. If anything, the ITAR language itself is very vague.

But usually the science type or payload data is one thing, and then the lower
level hardware telemetry is done in a different way.

I've used GovCloud to store ITAR data. It's cool. If you encrypt your ITAR
data, you can also store it in a public cloud like S3, but just for storage,
you shouldn't decrypt it there or have the keys there.

Source: I worked on the telemetry team at SpaceX.

------
kawfey
Another amateur radio sidenote for the day[0], SATNOGS[1] performs a similar
task by tracking and recording satellite passes of LEO cubesats with amateur
radio telemetry and communication payloads via a network of DIY ground
stations. Anyone can see a history of any pass of a tracked satellite over a
particular station including a RF spectrum waterfall, audio capture, and
telemetry output if supported.

The SATNOGS receivers, usually a low-cost RTLSDR, cover a much wider spectrum
than just amateur bands (which prohibits commercial use of it's spectrum), so
I wouldn't be surprised if non-amateur entities are eyeing the service, or if
SATNOGS organization is thinking about going commerical (although there's
already competition in this field besides AWS Ground Station).

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18543454](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18543454)

[1] [https://satnogs.org/](https://satnogs.org/)

------
cbanek
Looks very interesting. Looks like they use the NORAD ID to get frequency
information for the various channels? I wonder what frequencies/bands they
will support (since this gets down to the RF hardware on the groundstations)?

~~~
mirashii
Since they're asking for FCC license info and there isn't a canonical Norad ID
to frequency source, I assume the Norad info is just for tracking, Doppler,
and scheduling of passes.

~~~
cbanek
Yeah I just didn't see any box to put in a frequency on that page though,
although you can pick any NORAD ID. Maybe this is part of the "contact us"
procedure. I'm also guessing that the USSPACECOM will tell Amazon to not let
you try to follow anything classified.

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CobrastanJorji
Alright, that's just super cool.

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mirashii
This is missing so much key information into its usefulness that I really
question who this article is geared towards. There's no mention of supported
frequency ranges, receiver sensitivity, antenna sizes, polarization, location
of the stations. They talk only about downlink, so I assume that this is only
for downlink and that there's no uplink possibility, but if there is there's a
whole new range of technical specifications that would need to be discussed.

I usually say it's 12-18 months between when an AWS service is announced and
when it's actually useful and stable enough to use in production. In this
case, I'd easily double that.

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Tepix
People with cubesats or interested and willing to help should look into
SatNOGS. Running your own ground station is cheap (a $250 investment).

[https://satnogs.org/](https://satnogs.org/)

------
cweagans
There are a number of satellites with publicly available downlinks (think NOAA
weather sats). I'm curious about why I'd need to register that NORAD ID with
my AWS account to be able to receive that data - is it just so that the
orbital passes will show up appropriately when I want to reserve a contact or
something?

(Also, the "imaginary" sat that was added to the account in this case was in
fact NOAA 15. That one actually transmits realtime imagery to the ground that
anyone can receive).

------
EGreg
What I would like to see is “satellite as a service” for satellites to have
rentable space for uploading code, and accessing their capabilities in a
colocated way or full instance only (without breaking them... you’d need to
pay to cover the insurance too).

It’s far cheaper to send bits to space than actual matter on a rocket.

It would also promote re-use of satellites and mitigate Kessler syndrome
(unless induced demand makes it worse).

------
mmaunder
Anyone know how big or sensitive their dishes are? I wonder if they could be
used for some fun astronomy stuff when not being used to talk to sats. Also
curious about the transcievers and so on. Not sure if they'd disclose any of
this due to security concerns.

Also, I'm guessing you need to provide your NORAD ID and FCC license so these
dishes don't get used for sigint.

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czbond
Where would I go to learn from scratch how to launch a cube sat of my own?
edit: or "iphone size level similar"

------
sidcool
I can see great applications for scientific computing here. Directly gather
images from Hubble and process

------
mistrial9
I think this is a play to get into the image-recognition side of it, which has
a lot of implications.

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matchagaucho
Kind of a "shoo-in" for the JEDI contract now.

------
holstvoogd
How imagine a AWS 2018 planning meeting: Shall we fix the NLB healthchecks or
do something cool like with satellites and shit?

plz fix you current shit AWS instead of introducing new shit every week

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GromitInWA
Can I downlink high-bandwidth data like video?

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plopz
Could this be used to ingest NOAAPORT?

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ble
"Downlink into AWS" would be a clearer name. This is just about passing your
data down from orbit and getting it into AWS.

~~~
philsnow
It's about not having to build your own Ground Station. To me "Downlink"
implies that it's just the link between two pre-existing things, the satellite
and something on the ground.

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gct
Is the data time tagged?

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LeicaLatte
Literally planet scale.

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bognition
Finally true cloud computing /ducks/

~~~
WJW
But there are no clouds in space! Unless your particular spacecraft is flying
through the Oort cloud I suppose, but surely there's not so many of those
satellites out there that would make it worthwhile for AWS to start an entire
service for that?

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functional1st
Welcome to the Satellite Hoax -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6iXxaRjfEY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6iXxaRjfEY)

------
sebringj
This is cool but now I'm more concerned in learning how launching micro
satellites has become so easy for the masses which would be my opposite
reaction normally. Meaning this is not without bad side effects. I watched "in
a nutshell" about the end of space in that orbiting debris is becoming an
issue as its an exponential threat over time as small debris moving at 20 K
mph vaporizes things it comes in contact with, hence more debris, more
collisions and so forth eventually creating a death shield to any
incoming/outgoing space transport, effectively halting space travel for
centuries. Here is that video FYI
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS1ibDImAYU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS1ibDImAYU)
I don't see how this is helping but possibly there will be cleanup solutions.

~~~
garmaine
How? This isn’t launching space satellites.

~~~
MrBuddyCasino
Altough that would be awesome. Spin up additional satellites via API. Takes a
few days until they’re online, but at least they stream the launch video feed
in the AWS console.

Also, I think they kind of jumped the shark with this one.

~~~
jeffbarr
No sharks were jumped in the making of this service or blog post.

