Photo: AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) revealed its new AWS Ground Station program, which will take advantage of Lockheed Martin‘s new Verge antenna network. Through this integration, customers using AWS Ground Station gain the ability to download data from multiple satellites at the same time and to continue downloading data even when unplanned outages like a weather event impact parts of the network. And, Lockheed Verge customers benefit from being able to upload satellite commands and data through the AWS Ground Station and to quickly download large amounts of data over the high-speed AWS Ground Station network.

AWS Ground Station is a fully managed service. You don’t need to build or maintain antennas, and can focus on your work or research,” said Amazon Web Services Chief Evangelist Jeffrey Barr. “We’re starting out with a pair of ground stations today, and will have 12 in operation by mid-2019. Each ground station is associated with a particular AWS Region; the raw analog data from the satellite is processed by our modem digitizer into a data stream (in what is formally known as VITA 49 baseband or VITA 49 RF over IP data streams) and routed to an EC2 instance that is responsible for doing the signal processing to turn it into a byte stream.”

It has been a busy year for Amazon in the space industry. Earlier this year, Via Satellite‘s Mark Holmes interviewed Amazon Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Blue Origin Founder Jeff Bezos about his work with Blue Origin, and how he believes that the industry is on “Day One.” Additionally, AWS partnered with Globecomm, integrating its global satellite and fiber network.