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AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites

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Re: AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites

#61

Post by 7952 »

rtkwe wrote: post #46
sebringj wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article mentions ubiquitous micro satellites. This tech is simply following from that although not directly stated in the title. The fact that these micro satellites are cheap and so easy to cookie cutter and deploy is great in terms of tech but seems to compound the issue of space debris. Anyway, just after becoming aware of this I was less enthusiastic about the communications aspects.

Down linking data has never been the particularly difficult part of working with a satellite though getting it up there with all the approvals that requires was and still is the major hurdle. Just because it's easy to downlink doesn't mean the FCC is going to suddenly rubberstamp every startup's 10k satellite constellation.

Depends how much data you want to downlink though. Sats in LEO have fairly small footprints and you can only get data when that footprint is over a ground station.

Re: AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites

#62

Post by derefr »

nil_pointer wrote: post #26
jeletonskelly wrote: post #16

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.

Similar to Azure talking about developing underwater datacenters

Eh. Space is just a place that's annoying to ship to. (With the one key advantage of having line-of-sight to arbitrary deployed IoT devices.)

"Underwater", meanwhile, is more of a mode of operation / design for data centers, with the goal of that simplifying (and decreasing costs for) cooling.

An underwater data center doesn't imply that the data center is actually off-shore to any large degree. I'd imagine they'd look more like undersea-cable landing points, built "into" a beach.

Re: AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites

#63

Post by dr_orpheus »

cbanek wrote: post #18
tzakrajs wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Some might be encrypted, but I don't think they are all encrypted: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-tutorial-receiving-noaa-weat... 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 no…

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.

Re: AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites

#64

Post by tachion »

liotier wrote: post #47
jeletonskelly wrote: post #16

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.

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.

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

Re: AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites

#65

Post by CobrastanJorji »

liotier wrote: post #47
jeletonskelly wrote: post #16

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.

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.

Use a laser beam for heat dissipation. Bonus: Cloud Death Beam.

Re: AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites

#66

Post by 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.

Re: AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites

#67

Post by CobrastanJorji »

tachion wrote: post #64
liotier wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Sadly no. Space is cold but also very low on convenient mass to transfer the heat into. Vacuum is an ideal insulator. On Earth, you can put the heat into water, air, thermal pastes, etc., but in space, you have only slow old black body radiation, unless you do something more creative.

Re: AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites

#68

Post by 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.

Re: AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites

#69

Post by sek »

tachion wrote: post #64
liotier wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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

Re: AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites

#70

Post by patrickyeon »

tachion wrote: post #64
liotier wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Not as well as intuition suggests. Deep space is cold, but also the sun (and reflected energy from the Earth!) is pretty hot. Without air, there's no convection so it's all radiated energy transfer, so you're limited by how much surface area you can "point at" deep space while not also pointing it at the sun.
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