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AWS Ground Station
- o_____________o 7y ago> You can use radar satellite imagery of your various business facilities such as parking lots, logistic centers, and retail stores Could this be used to monitor someone's home?
- jrockway 7y agoYes. This is just the ground station, though, you would still need to put a satellite in orbit to receive messages from, however. And remember that it's somewhat expensive in terms of delta-V budget to have the satellite over someone's house exactly when you want it to be. Most people that want to spy on their neighbor will just buy a $30 spy cam with a 4G uplink.
- monocasa 7y agoSurveillance satellites aren't normally in geostationary orbits either, as that's too far away for the optics. Your deltav comment alludes to it. They seem to be into highly elliptical orbits.
- birdyrooster 7y agoYou would need an insane amount of LEO satellites in order to get a feed which was continuous. I don't even know how to start doing the maths on this one.
- monocasa 7y agoWell, you're not going to be able to make out a house from 100x farther away either. Thanks to Trump's inability to not tweet anything he sees, we know that Block 4 KH-11 satellites have a 10cm/pixel about standard (they're in an elliptical orbit, but they use which ever is closest at the time). So we're looking at a 10M/pixel in geostationary orbit, assuming you can get the same optics that NROL was shipping up as late as 2013.
- tomcam 7y ago> Thanks to Trump's inability to not tweet anything he sees If there’s one thing I hate about that guy, it’s his being the most transparent presidency in history.
- monocasa 7y agoHis actions are sort of the worst of both worlds here. On one hand leaking information that's only useful to geopolitical adversaries (probably because he didn't understand the implications of tweeting stuff like that), and on the other hand being a new bar for destruction of public records when it comes to decisions made by the administration (somehow even beating out the Obama administration). https://www.democracynow.org/2020/2/6/national_archives_record_retention_matthew_connelly https://www.democracynow.org/2020/2/6/national_archives_reco... https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/10/trump-papers-filing-system-635164 https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/10/trump-papers-filin... It'd be a huge stretch to call it "the most transparent presidency in history".
- mopsi 7y ago> On one hand leaking information that's only useful to geopolitical adversaries What did he leak? From what I can tell, the photo merely confirmed what was already a reasonable educated guess.
- monocasa 7y agoThe resolution of the optics.
- mopsi 7y agoWhy do you think it was a secret to anyone? Any amateur astronomer can figure it out from mirror size and orbital parameters. A 1968 NASA publication (sold for $3.00) discusses various limitations, concluding: "The telescope objective for best resolution, as viewed from a satellite at an altitude of 320 kilometers, requires a diameter of about 1.6 meters to resolve a 12-centimeter radius" https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19690003603.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/196900... That approximately 10 cm resolution has always been a resonable guess of the capabilities of best spy satellites. Trump's tweet surprised no-one. It confirmed what has always been thought to be true.
- hobofan 7y agoHow about equipping every Starlink satelite with some optics?
- birdyrooster 7y agoBut if a $30 spy cam with 4G uplink was detected by the marks anti-surveillance regime (https://www.bastille.net/cell-phone-detection https://www.bastille.net/cell-phone-detection) you could be talking a huge liability. Might be more discreet to use satellites with lower cost if things don't work out so great.
- detaro 7y agoThis is a "bring-your-own-satellite" service.
- tracker1 7y agoI know that some have worked on this... but have given thought to how one could use lower power hives/swarms in order to do surveillance. Not so much for spying on neighbors but virtual tours of national parks and monuments, stitching many photos together to form 3D tour space. High end capacitors over batteries, and a swarm where individual drones come home to charge, keeping roughly 1/3-1/2 in reserve and accounting for flight times to/from target area... For less coverage, of course, less drones would be needed. Getting down closer to the size between a large bug and small bird's body for total size would probably be needed as well for a bit of stealth... noise is another concern. Interesting work/ideas.
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- bitminer 7y agoMonitor their home? No. Imagery from space is only on a 90 minute interval and clouds get in the way. See digitalglobe.com for pricing. It's about $5k per square km iirc. (With more satellites you can get more frequent coverage of course.) Radar of course is weatherproof but again the cost is ridiculous unless you are a government or Exxon.
- fergbrain 7y agoCould this be used for downlink only? For example, to pull down NOAA satellite data?
- mdszy 7y agoI'm like 90% sure it would be cheaper to just build your own antenna and an RTL-SDR setup to do that sort of thing yourself. There's no way it's cost effective for that.
- garmaine 7y agoI’m 100% sure. You can’t beat free.
- mdszy 7y agoWell, not quite free. Still gotta buy the wire, other supporting antenna hardware, and RTL-SDR lol But yes, absolutely.
- curiousgal 7y agoWait, shouldn't there be some sort of authentication step? The only barrier to communicating with satellites is the equipment?!
- mdszy 7y agoNot with the example given of NOAA satellites. Those simply broadcast data on regular intervals. If you had to authenticate, can you imagine a single satellite dealing with all the traffic of uplink/downlink required for authentication? It simply wouldn't work or maky any sense. This is not true for all satellites, obviously. There are private ones that use encrypted communications, but weather satellites can be easily used if you have the proper antenna and equipment setup to do so.
- fergbrain 7y agoSure, SDR is the easy answer if you’re within LOS. But let’s assume I wanted to listen to another geosynchronous satellite that I wasn’t in LOS of.
- schappim 7y agoWhere does one get the satellite to rent?
- d_silin 7y agoHere to help! Sign up a contract with us, and we'll give you a satellite to rent.
- dominotw 7y agowho are you?
- ExodusOrbitals1 7y agoWe are https://www.exodusorbitals.com https://www.exodusorbitals.com
- dominotw 7y agomaybe add it to you profile. thank you.
- speedgoose 7y agoCan it run Minecraft?
- ExodusOrbitals1 7y agoWell, yes...
- garmaine 7y agoThere’s dozens of them up there. You rent time and bandwidth on a telecom satellite.
- kylek 7y agoSomeone like Intelsat? (You don't generally rent a whole satellite. You pay by the second for tiny pieces of the spectrum.)
- flicker-rate 7y ago> 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?
- d_silin 7y agoLaunch a satellite, obviously. But you can look up existing ones at http://celestrak.com http://celestrak.com
- bagels 7y agoYou get one for free if you launch a satellite.
- p1mrx 7y agoThey typically do walk-ins. Just look for the big metal door.
- jsjohnst 7y agohttps://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/CRSRA/generalFAQ.html https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/CRSRA/generalFAQ.html
- anfractuosity 7y agoI recall looking at this a while ago, but I couldn't seem to find what kind of RF hardware amazon is using, is there any information on that?
- botto 7y agoI don't think AWS are involved in the satellites themselves, they are simply making access to ground station equipment available over the net.
- anfractuosity 7y agoMmm, I'm curious about what transmitter/receiver/antenna, they're using on the ground.
- jeffbarr 7y agoPer the Details page: "You can connect with any satellite in low Earth orbit (LEO) and medium Earth orbit (MEO) operating in X-band and S-band frequencies, including: S-band uplink and downlink, X-band narrowband and wideband downlink."
- Rebelgecko 7y agoThey have some information about the frequencies stuffed at the bottom of their FAQs. One omission that bugs me is that they don't tell you the location of the ground stations, which can be a dealbreaker for whether or not this is effective
- kartikkumar 7y agoIt's leveraging Lockheed technology [1]. [1] https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/verge.html https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/verge.html
- anfractuosity 7y agoThanks a lot! Will give that a watch.
- social_quotient 7y agoHow might this impact hedge funds and equity trading strategies? They specifically mention parking lots which I interpreted as gaining sales metrics and throughput data on businesses.
- nine_k 7y agoAren't such shots form orbit already available from various commercial satellites? Likely they are already used.
- grenoire 7y agoHonestly, this is simply sci-fi to me. The fact that we have companies providing satellite communication infrastructure, just extremely futuristic. Am I just too slow with the catching up?
- d_silin 7y agoWe also can offer you an actual satellite for rent, starting 2021. Have a look at https://www.exodusorbitals.com https://www.exodusorbitals.com
- ghouse 7y agoSaaS? Satellite as a Service?
- d_silin 7y agoYes, more or less.
- nexuist 7y agoThis is ridiculous and I love it. Do your satellites have cameras that can be interfaced with as well? Could I have a satellite monitoring a specific area 24/7?
- d_silin 7y agoYes for cameras. No to 24/7 monitoring for quite a long while - need a really large constellation for that (think Starlink/OneWeb scale).
- nexuist 7y agoUnderstandable - could I instead strategically rent time slots for when the satellite passes over a certain location? That's not 24/7, but once a day for basic data science is certainly enough.
- navaati 7y agoI'm actually a bit sorry to derail the grandparent (totally fine !) sales process :) but if what you want is daily imagery of a specific place for data science purpose, check out Planet Labs, they do just that !
- endymi0n 7y agoThis 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.
- SkyMarshal 7y agoWhat’s unclear to me is, if any company can run their own satellite fleet, even micro ones, can they really not afford to run their own ground stations too? What’s the target customer profile of this service exactly?
- mirashii 7y agoI worked at a company that with a fleet of microsatellites that also built and managed our own network of groundstations. The costs of groundstations can definitely add up. Scouting for locations with good RF properties takes a lot of long flights, weird dealings with customs (RF equipment is questioned heavily). Then you have to find a site to host it, maybe ask them to beef up their security, construction to support your hardware once it gets above a certain size (dishes and radomes for S and X band comms), network connections and redundant network connections, and a team of people to manage and coordinate all of it. It's certainly its own undertaking and could easily be outsourced to a service with the right specs. Whether AWS's offering here will rise to meet that is yet to be seen.
- closeparen 7y ago>maybe ask them to beef up their security What's the threat model for a ground station? Interception? Sabotage? Hardware theft? Can you even sell these things on eBay?
- xenophonf 7y agoSatellite 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'll remind you, is highly directional. Or what about getting access to the ground station's network traffic? I'll bet that even when it's encrypted, there's still useful signals intelligence to be gleaned, and when it isn't encrypted (or encrypted badly), boy howdy. Satellites and their attendant infrastructure cost billions of dollars to deploy and maintain. They are incredibly valuable targets, making it worth an attacker's while to penetrate them. This is way beyond simple vandalism or ransomware.
- thekhatribharat 7y agopreviously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20991730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20991730
- bluetwo 7y agoUse it with this? https://agi.com/satellite-ar https://agi.com/satellite-ar
- dbbbbbbbb 7y agoI wonder if this is related to Amazons Project Kuiper satellite broadband constellation, would make sense for them to be building out their ground station capabilities.
- carlio 7y agoProbably more likely an offshoot or requirement from Blue Origin.
- FPGAhacker 7y agoMore likely Kuiper.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- NickNameNick 7y agoWasn't this announced last year?
- jeffbarr 7y agoYes it was: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-ground-station-ready-to-ingest-process-satellite-data/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-ground-station-ready-to...
- mkchoi212 7y agoI thought this was an April fools joke once I clicked on the link. The bandwidth they are operation on (54 MHz) is ridiculous though! Truly sci-fi-ish stuff going on here. Also, did Amazon build this from scratch or did they acquire a company that had the basic infra for this kind of stuff?
- oh_sigh 7y agoWhat's so weird about 54mhz? It's very close to the somewhat commonly used 6 meter band by hams
- BenjiWiebe 7y agoBandwidth and frequency are very different. They have a 54MHz wide uplink, at whichever of the supported bands you want.
- tommica 7y agoI'm a person who knows nothing about these things, and my quick googling didn't help me - how "fast" is 54MHz wide uplink? Can it be measured in internet network speeds, or in what kind of way can I compare the speed of it?
- fakturk 7y agoI think this is the real SaaS (Satellite as a Service ) o.O
- fakturk 7y agoand next service come as a FaaS (Fusion Reactor as a Service), you can produce your own power and pay as you use it =D
- jvanderbot 7y agoTalk by Tom Soderstrom[1] of JPL on this from December 19. They announced a partnership last year for various things, including downlink of high definition video from the ISS. [2] 1. Tom is part of the office of information technology office at JPL 2. https://www.geekwire.com/2019/amazon-web-services-nasa-team-stream-video-space-via-cloud/ https://www.geekwire.com/2019/amazon-web-services-nasa-team-...
- canada_dry 7y agoHaving just finished reading this story https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22718330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22718330 the author might want to check out setting up several AWS ground stations. I suspect the cost could be out-of-this-world.
- jcrites 7y agoPreviously discussed on HN (Nov 27, 2018): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18546272 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18546272
- keithyjohnson 7y agoThank god I now have an easy way to communicate with all my satellites.
- dzhiurgis 7y agoA bit of a tangent, but how feasible is it for Starlink to crowdsource their ground stations? Let people contribute to the constellation by putting up antennas on top of their fiber connections (perhaps via solar roofs). I think hard thing about Spacex is gonna be all the legalities across the planet of establishing an ISP. In some places it's demonopolised, but in some seems it might require to put up their own network.
- gvalente 7y agoProbably the only costumer is Elon Musk
- organicfigs 7y agoI'm getting jealous. After a career on the software side of communications (r&d in ble and 4g) I left for the healthcare industry for many reasons but mainly driven by the fact the projects were so monotone. Had I been able to apply to work for a project like this, I surely would have enjoyed staying around longer.
- bmy78 7y agoSo where’s the free tier?
- threeio 7y agoOr you could use something like Satnogs.org ;)
- donkey-hotei 7y agoThank you.
- pyuser583 7y agoThought they’ve been doing this for a while?
- SergeAx 7y agoAmazon 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.
- MAGZine 7y agoto 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.
- tracker1 7y agoWhile this may well be true... more likely it's part of their logistics monitoring.
- thspimpolds 7y agoThat 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.
- neosat 7y agoIt's easy to miss the data processing and storage story. It potentially sounds like a fascinating story of vertically integrating to make your processing, cloud storage, data management (of huge amounts of data) more attractive compared to competition. Also the companies/organizations that this will be interesting to (think defence) are likely to have large overall budget for other cloud services. Well played Amazon!
- soheil 7y agoUnfortunately looks like this is not available to almost anyone except in rare cases: "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."
- jsjohnst 7y agoYou’d have both those pieces of information handily available if you had satellites in space. If you don’t have satellites in space, not target customer?
- sabujp 7y agowhat i'd use it for: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/05/stock-value-satellite-images-investing/586009/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/05/stock-v...
- kartikkumar 7y agoThe satellite ground station market is quite dynamic at the moment. As the data generated on-orbit continues to grow, the need for robust ground infrastructure becomes that much more important. Ground-Station-as-a-Service (GSaaS) is something that AWS stepped into given the fact that AWS is used quite extensively for the data processing chain, so it was a logical play for them to verticalize. AWS partnered with Lockheed to build out the hardware network [1][2]. They've got some decent competition in the market. We published a round-up article of ground station providers a while back [3]. The move to higher frequencies is changing the market substantially. This year, a number of optical ground stations were supposed to be deployed, given growth of satellite terminals [4]. We'll have to see with the virus what actually ends up happening. [1] https://spacenews.com/amazon-lockheed-venture-casts-shadow-on-ground-station-startups/ https://spacenews.com/amazon-lockheed-venture-casts-shadow-o... [2] https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/verge.html https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/verge.html [3] https://blog.satsearch.co/2019-09-25-ground-station-service-providers-an-overview-of-telemetry-and-telecommand-communication-services-and-networks-for-small-satellites https://blog.satsearch.co/2019-09-25-ground-station-service-... [4] https://blog.satsearch.co/2020-01-22-optical-communications-for-small-satellites-and-cubesats-product-roundup https://blog.satsearch.co/2020-01-22-optical-communications-... Edit: Added/updated references
- cek 7y agoKindel'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. [1] https://ceklog.kindel.com/2020/03/30/kindels-3rd-law/ https://ceklog.kindel.com/2020/03/30/kindels-3rd-law/
- elkos 7y agoIf you are interested in an open satellite ground-station network, with 330+ ground-station you may want to check out SatNOGS. https://satnogs.org 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 https://db.satnogs.org). In some cases we are able to visualize the teremetry data on our grafana dashboards(https://dashboard.satnogs.org 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 https://wiki.satnogs.org) disclaimer: I'm a member of the board of Libre Space Foundation(https://libre.space https://libre.space) the non-profit organization developing and operating SatNOGS.
- myself248 7y agoThat was my first thought, "oh, it's a commercial satnogs". Which I suppose proves it's a good idea. :)
- anuraaga 7y agoUsed to work at a startup aiming to create a similar type of network. AWS joining was refreshing for validating the market and providing a big target to work against. AWS / Lockheed made a good call with phased array antennas (SpaceX too on the satellite side). Can't scale to many different users if your ground stations can only serve one satellite at a time, similar for a satellite providing internet. I suspect there might still be challenges getting enough gain for high bandwidth, but I'm sure it'll improve with better tech. A dish is just physically stuck pointing at one angle.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]