Category: Satellite

Every day, people around the world are impacted by the unexpected – from pandemics, to natural and human-wrought disasters, to economic crises. Technologies like the cloud can empower communities to prepare for and respond to the unexpected so that when a crisis hits, they can continue to advance. AWS works with customers and partners to build software solutions that improve government and nonprofits’ prediction, preparedness, response, and recovery capabilities—solutions that are being leveraged across Latin America and the Caribbean.

Satellogic is a leader in high-resolution Earth observation (EO) data collection. The company is creating a live catalog of Earth and delivering daily updates to create a complete picture of changes to our planet for decision makers. Watch a new video to understand how Satellogic uses AWS Ground Station and the AWS Cloud to democratize access to EO data that’s being used for high-impact missions.

Public sector organizations and commercial enterprises alike are reaping the benefits of AWS Ground Station, which lets customers command and control satellite communications, process satellite data, and scale their satellite operations. This article provides a general overview of AWS Ground Station, its key benefits, and general advice for getting started.

With increasing pressure from climate change, loss of biodiversity, and demand for natural resources from already stressed ecosystems, it has become essential to understand and address environmental changes by making sustainable land use decisions with the latest and most accurate data. As part of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI), AWS invited Joe Sexton, chief scientist and co-founder of terraPulse, to share how AWS technologies and open data are supporting terraPulse’s efforts to provide accurate and up-to-date information on the world’s changing ecosystems.

As the number of spacecraft and spacecraft missions accelerates, moving aerospace and satellite operations to the cloud via digital transformation — including virtualizing the ground segment — is key for economic viability. In this blog post, we explain the benefits of virtualizing the ground segment in the cloud and present the core components of a reference architecture that uses AWS to support several stages of a comprehensive ground segment virtualization. Then, working from this model, we present additional reference architectures for virtualizing the ground segment that can accommodate various requirements and usage scenarios.

Weather radars see more than just the weather: they see smoke from fires, meteors, birds, mayflies, and almost anything else in the atmosphere. This makes weather radars an invaluable tool for scientists seeking to further the understanding of atmospheric processes and anything else that happens to be flying through the radar’s field of view. The Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI) seeks to accelerate sustainability-related innovation and research by helping to minimizing the cost and time required to store, acquire, and analyze large weather and climate datasets.

A new interactive AWS CLI tool expands the functionality of AWS Ground Station. You now have a simple way to schedule AWS Ground Station satellite contacts directly from your terminal. Learn more about how to use the CLI tool with scheduling, viewing, and canceling contacts to your satellite.

With AWS Ground Station, you can now deliver data directly into Amazon S3 buckets. This simplifies downlinking because you no longer need to run an Amazon EC2 receiver instance. It also saves you cost and simplifies the creation of automated processing pipelines like the one we are going to show in this blog. By using an automated Earth observation (EO) pipeline, you can reduce the operating burden of your staff, as after scheduling a contact, everything is handled automatically and you’ll get a notification when the processed data is available. Read on to learn how to create an automated EO pipeline that receives and processes data from the NOAA-20 (JPSS-1) satellite, using this new AWS Ground Station feature.

Space exploration has advanced significantly over the past 40 years. With missions like the space shuttle, NASA has led the way, demonstrating for the world their ability to push the boundaries of technological innovation to explore space, collect data, and enable scientific knowledge to make the world a better place. We are now in an exciting and daring new age as more organizations around the world are looking to explore space and achieve a sustainable operating presence. And fulfilling space-based missions demands innovation. Learn how AWS is supporting customers globally to push the boundaries of space exploration.

Saildrone builds and operates a fleet of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) designed to collect high-resolution oceanographic and atmospheric data in remote oceans. Known as saildrones, each vehicle can stay at sea for up to 12 months, transmitting real-time data via satellite. The data collected is used to inform climate models and extreme weather prediction, maritime domain awareness, maps and charts, and sustainable management of resources. Using clean, renewable wind and solar power, saildrones provide access to the world’s oceans at a fraction of the cost of traditional ship-based methods, while drastically reducing the carbon footprint of global ocean observation.