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As of November 30, 2024, AWS Ground Station will discontinue support for the AQUA satellite due to its declining data quality and erratic mission scheduling as it nears the end of its operational life. For insights on utilizing AWS Ground Station for Earth observation applications, check out our blog on Automated Earth observation using AWS Ground Station Amazon S3 data delivery.
In today’s information-driven society, access to data is crucial for making informed decisions and shaping behaviors. For instance, recent imagery from NASA depicting the melting ice caps on Eagle Island in Antarctica showcases the urgent need to protect endangered species. Over the last decade, an influx of companies specializing in Earth observation (EO) has made valuable EO data more accessible, leading to significant advancements in EO science.
The true value of EO data lies in its capability to monitor changes. Recent advancements in satellite technology, particularly radar systems, enable us to observe the Earth even through cloudy conditions. This advancement in reliable and precise satellite data paves the way for operational services powered by satellite imagery.
As competition intensifies in the race to deploy fleets of small low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites, innovations such as miniaturized satellites and the reuse of launch vehicles have significantly reduced the costs associated with satellite construction and launch. If you find yourself within a satellite’s coverage area and require transponder capacity on a temporary basis, or prefer to avoid investing in expensive satellite ground segment infrastructure, consider leveraging AWS Ground Station.
AWS Ground Station is a fully managed, pay-per-use service that allows you to communicate with satellites without the necessity of purchasing, leasing, constructing, or maintaining your own ground stations. If you’re contemplating the use of EO data for a startup initiative or scientific research, this guide outlines how to utilize AWS Ground Station to receive and process data from Earth observation satellites. With the proposed solution, you can have usable data stored in your Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket within minutes of establishing satellite contact.
Global change monitoring has become a reality, and AWS Ground Station enhances both the speed and affordability of data access. The data received can be further processed using AWS’s global infrastructure, which includes cost-effective storage and web publishing with Amazon S3, real-time streaming capabilities through Amazon Kinesis, or machine learning applications using Amazon SageMaker.
To utilize AWS Ground Station, you will need to collaborate with the AWS Ground Station team to onboard your satellite into your designated account. Upon onboarding, the satellite becomes accessible in your account, allowing you to schedule communication contacts. For the purpose of this guide, we have onboarded the NASA AQUA satellite, which was launched in 2002 as part of NASA’s Earth Science Data Systems (ESDS) program. AQUA orbits the Earth in a Sun-synchronous near-polar trajectory at an altitude of 705 km, categorizing it as a LEO satellite. It is equipped with five active sensing instruments, contributing significantly to the development of validated, global, interactive Earth system models that accurately predict global change.
AWS Ground Station currently supports LEO and medium Earth orbit (MEO) satellites. Due to their orbital characteristics, these satellites are only visible from the ground for a few minutes during each pass, and communication is feasible only when they are in the line of sight of a ground station. AWS Ground Station establishes the connection, receiving, demodulating, and decoding radiofrequency signals before transferring the decoded data to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances as a VITA 49 stream.
A data capture application running on the receiving EC2 instance ingests the incoming VITA 49 stream. The payload within each VITA 49 packet is extracted and consolidated into a raw data file, which is stored locally and also uploaded to Amazon S3 for future reprocessing. AQUA transmits Consultative Committee for Space Data (CCSDS)-compliant Channel Access Data Unit (CADU) data frames. NASA’s Real-Time Telemetry Processing System (RT-STPS) is employed to process CADUs into a Level 0 data product, which is then sent to Amazon S3. In earlier instances, the International Planetary Observation Processing Package (IPOPP), previously managed by NASA, was utilized to transform Level 0 data into higher-level products like Level 1 HDF files, Level 2 HDF files, and TIFF images. IPOPP is configured on the processing EC2 instance, which subsequently uploads Level 1 and Level 2 data products to Amazon S3. Once in Amazon S3, these data products can be published to data subscribers or accessed by other AWS services, including Amazon SageMaker, for near real-time processing.
For a detailed outline of the data processing levels as established by NASA, refer to the relevant resources.