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Satellite Communications Infrastructure - Ingesting Satellite Data Directly into the Cloud with AWS Ground Station

You use ground station antennas around the world on a pay-as-you-go basis and manage communication schedules with satellites through an API. This article explains how to ingest downlink data into S3 and how to build a real-time processing pipeline.

About 6 min read

The Challenges of Satellite Communications and the Innovation of Ground Station

Artificial satellites are put to use in many fields such as Earth observation, weather forecasting, communications, and positioning, but receiving data from a satellite requires a ground station (antenna facility). Traditional ground stations cost money to build the antennas and to operate / maintain them, and required securing specialized operators. Furthermore, because communication is possible only during the limited time when a satellite passes over a ground station (a few minutes to a dozen or so minutes per pass), multiple ground stations need to be placed around the world. AWS Ground Station is a managed ground station service released in 2019. You can use ground station antennas that AWS has placed around the world on a pay-as-you-go basis, and it streams communication data from satellites directly to EC2 instances. You can start ingesting satellite data, and you pay only for the antenna time you use.

Contact Scheduling and Data Ingestion

Using Ground Station starts with configuring the satellite's mission profile (frequency band, bandwidth, polarization, and so on). Next, you register the satellite's orbital information (TLE: Two-Line Element) and calculate the visibility windows at each ground station. When you schedule a contact (a communication session with a satellite), the ground station antenna automatically tracks the satellite at the specified time and receives the downlink data. The received data can be streamed to an EC2 instance or stored in S3. As a data processing pipeline, there is a configuration that decodes / preprocesses the received data on EC2, stores it in S3, and runs ML inference (such as image classification) with SageMaker. For Earth observation satellites, you can build a pipeline that stores received SAR (synthetic aperture radar) images and optical images in S3 and performs land use classification and change detection with SageMaker.

Use Cases and Pricing

The main use cases of Ground Station are Earth observation (agricultural monitoring, disaster response, environmental monitoring, urban planning) and acquisition of weather data (receiving images / numerical data from weather satellites). They also include satellite IoT (collecting telemetry from IoT devices using low Earth orbit satellites), and satellite communications (data relay via satellite). Pricing is pay-as-you-go per minute of contact and varies by antenna size and frequency band. As a guideline, S-band downlink is about $3 per minute and X-band wideband downlink is about $10 per minute (as of August 2026). For low Earth orbit satellite missions that make several contacts a day, each lasting a few minutes, the monthly charge is determined by the number and duration of contacts. Through AWS Data Exchange, it is also possible to purchase data directly from satellite data providers such as Capella Space (SAR images) and Spire Global (weather / ocean data). This means you can make use of satellite data even without owning your own satellites.

Ground Station Pricing

AWS Ground Station pricing is pay-as-you-go based on the duration of contacts (communication sessions with satellites). The price differs by the antenna bandwidth (wideband and narrowband). The duration of a contact is determined by the satellite's orbit and the location of the ground station. With Ground Station, you do not own antenna facilities yourself and pay only for the antenna time you use. Charges for data processing on EC2 instances apply separately, and in a configuration that stores downlink data directly in S3, no EC2 instance is used for reception.

Integration with Data Processing Pipelines

With Ground Station, you can feed received satellite data into processing infrastructure in the cloud. You can build a pipeline that stores data received at a ground station in S3 and uses that as a trigger to start subsequent processing automatically. You can assemble processing such as converting / correcting the received raw data and analyzing images with machine learning as a single flow. You can assemble the steps from reception through putting the data to use on AWS. You can connect received data straight into processing in the cloud.

Summary - Guidelines for Putting Ground Station to Use

AWS Ground Station is a service that provides satellite communication ground stations as a managed service and lets you ingest satellite data into the cloud. You can use pay-as-you-go access to ground station antennas around the world, streaming of data to EC2, and data processing pipelines built on integration with S3 and SageMaker in combination. For organizations considering Earth observation, weather analysis, and IoT data collection using satellite data, Ground Station is one of the options in which you do not own ground station infrastructure yourself.

References (Official AWS Resources)

The primary sources for this page are the official AWS website and documentation. Check the official pages below for the latest specifications and pricing.

If this page and the official documentation disagree, treat the official documentation as authoritative.

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Related Services

AWS Ground Station SpecializedA managed service that provides satellite ground station infrastructure as a serviceAmazon EC2 EssentialA compute service that provides virtual servers in the cloudAmazon S3 EssentialA scalable object storage service

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