> To add satellites to your account, please email aws-groundstation@amazon.com with the NORAD ID, your FCC license information, and your customer account number and someone will contact you. Does anyone know how to get a NORAD ID?
AWS Ground Station
161–170 of 184 posts
Re: AWS Ground Station
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
A few solid cases are: - space-qualification for the satellite control software. You need to test your own flight software in space, so you use our satellite platform to run test/validation and then reuse on your own satellite. - space-based algorithm tests, such as data compression/error correction or radiation hardening through software means. Inter-satellite link protocols is also a rich field for software develop…
> Autonomy algorithms tests: for example for automatic collision avoidance software Will you have some super hypervisor software, which can take over and recover from the consequences of any bugs in the software under test?
Yes
Re: AWS Ground Station
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
It depends on the SNR. You can assume that almost all satellite connections use between 0.2 and 3 bit/s/Hz. It's likely closer to 1 bit/s/Hz though.
So operating with 54MHz of bandwidth would result in a transfer rate of somewhere on the order of 54 Mbps?
Many cable channels are using DVB-S2 8PSK at 5/6 rate. That would be 110 Mbps in 54 MHz (45 Msyms/s).
Re: AWS Ground Station
#164Amazon has a habit to make it's internal tools into AWS services (while still using them internally). I think it shows a tip of some space-related works inside.
to my knowledge, amazon had done a lot of satellite image processing for certain three letter agencies. this is probably related to that more than anything.
That would not be done on Ground Station, at least in standard regions. Once you hit that level, you are into at least the Gov region.
That being said, those agencies already have huge ground stations at their disposal run by NASA and other "groups". They don't need this service, they would ingest them over NIPRNet or SIPRNet directly into AWS Gov or AWS Gov Secret for processing.
Re: AWS Ground Station
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
Satellite navigation is a key strategic asset, as is any system that carries national and trans-national communications. Imagine being able to interfere with a navy's navigation, maybe not enough to stop them from getting somewhere but definitely enough to slow them down. Or imagine being able to change the position of a communications satellite, a device that is basically just dumb microwave relay---and microwave, I…
Don't really know any specifics, but I'd imagine being able to use the compromised satellites as simple rams against military satellites could be a significant risk, depending on the size of the fleet... even if not destroying a target. Not to mention just plain destruction of bringing down a fleet of satellites.
Very few commercial satellites carry enough maneuvering fuel to ram any military satellite. And none of them are equipped with the sensors needed for an intercept.
Re: AWS Ground Station
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
They do have some impressive "I didn't know anyone would need that!" services. I also love this one: https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/ > AWS Snowmobile is an Exabyte-scale data transfer service used to move extremely large amounts of data to AWS. You can transfer up to 100PB per Snowmobile, a 45-foot long ruggedized shipping container, pulled by a semi-trailer truck. (...)
I work on Google Cloud and have an obvious bias here, but having thought about this for a couple year now, this does not seem like a good or cost-effective way to move that much data. In particular if you have ~100PB of data to move and you are in a location that can be reached by a 45-foot long shipping container on a truck with access to the ~350KW of power it takes to run Snowmobile, you're clearly not somewhere _…
I guess you didn't notice that Google Cloud has a thing that competes with Snowball?
https://cloud.google.com/transfer-appliance
Also, if you want to know an extreme edge case that can't (currently) be done any other way, consider the astronomical observatories at the South Pole.
Re: AWS Ground Station
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work on Google Cloud and have an obvious bias here, but having thought about this for a couple year now, this does not seem like a good or cost-effective way to move that much data. In particular if you have ~100PB of data to move and you are in a location that can be reached by a 45-foot long shipping container on a truck with access to the ~350KW of power it takes to run Snowmobile, you're clearly not somewhere _…
There is your first mistake: thinking the customer wants to solve the problem in a a good or cost-effective way. Snowmobile was built because a pre-sales engineer sarcastically said backing up a truck full of hard drives to a customers datacenter would be the fastest way to import X PB of data. It's probably loading from a tape silo and spent 18 months at the customer site.
No, it was built because a solutions architect sat next to a film producer on a plane and talked about how to solve for his unique needs.
Re: AWS Ground Station
#168Kindel's 3rd Law[1] – Amazon will enter every existing business, channel, and market. If said business, channel, or market doesn’t already exist, Amazon will try to invent it.
Re: AWS Ground Station
#169This was sufficiently close in timing that I wasn't sure for a moment whether this was just an early caught April Fools. Then again, the more I think about it, the more this makes sense. Satellite business is hard and capital intensive enough as it is, for starters in the micro-satellite business it would be absolutely prohibitive to run their own hardware just to receive those signals.
They do have some impressive "I didn't know anyone would need that!" services. I also love this one: https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/ > AWS Snowmobile is an Exabyte-scale data transfer service used to move extremely large amounts of data to AWS. You can transfer up to 100PB per Snowmobile, a 45-foot long ruggedized shipping container, pulled by a semi-trailer truck. (...)
The real reason Snowmobile exists: to knock out potential opposition to large-scale migration from on-prem data centers into AWS.
Most of the intro decisions around moving to the cloud happen before Amazon is ever involved in the sales cycle. There are some managerial accountants and IT people getting involved to evaluate options in a process called "Evaluation of Alternatives." At some point, Amazon probably started hearing that the IT people were saying "we can't possibly move all of that data to the cloud, it would swamp our network or take five years just to finish the network transfer."
Enter Snowmobile, which cuts that conversation thread off at the knees. Amazon can go to a Fortune 100 company that is evaluating a move and honestly claim that they are prepared to move exabytes of data, physically, into the cloud. And it's not some premium feature that they're going to get charged bajillions for, it's a stock feature of AWS. (Even if it costs a lot of money)
Snowmobile isn't targeted at the average customer, it's targeted specifically at the accountants, IT architects, and management consultants evaluating the decision to move all of Fortune 100 Company X from on-prem data centers into 100% AWS. One extra hug from Amazon to let the most risk-averse person know that they have it covered, and would they please go ahead and write their 9-figure check to AWS.
Re: AWS Ground Station
#170If you are interested in an open satellite ground-station network, with 330+ ground-station you may want to check out SatNOGS. https://satnogs.org
The SatNOGS Network (https//network.satnogs.org) collects data from hundreds of satellites through hundreds of stations globally. More details on the satellites we monitor are on our satellite database(https://db.satnogs.org). In some cases we are able to visualize the teremetry data on our grafana dashboards(https://dashboard.satnogs.org)
If you are interested in participating on our community, want info to build you own ground-station or get your own equipment on-line don't hesitate to check our wiki(https://wiki.satnogs.org)
disclaimer: I'm a member of the board of Libre Space Foundation(https://libre.space) the non-profit organization developing and operating SatNOGS.