A satellite ground station. Photo: Ben Freeman

[Via Satellite 02-05-2016] Atlas Space Operations, in cooperation with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and partner RT Logic has successfully tested its Freedom Platform, performing numerous live S-band downlink operations using a support antenna in Southern California. This test validates operational functionality of the Atlas Freedom Platform by testing the connection between operational space assets and the Atlas ground architecture. Atlas collected vital system performance metrics from the tests, which used cloud-based virtual systems and 100 percent encrypted connections.

The Atlas Freedom Platform allows low latency Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications via the REST web service standard. The platform allows customers to configure, task, and command satellites, while providing data dissemination and archiving. Atlas provides data warehousing backed by Amazon Web Services.

“Our base system is fully automated. If a customer doesn’t need any tailoring we can beat competitors pricing by large margins,” said Sean McDaniel, CEO of Atlas. “We must make ground station access more affordable for the new space industry to take off.”