Cloud service for communicating with orbiting satellites to collect and downlink data without building physical dish infrastructure.
A weather forecasting company uses AWS Ground Station to download high-resolution imagery from their weather satellite every 90 minutes as it orbits Earth. Instead of building and maintaining their own satellite dish facilities across multiple continents, they schedule downlink contacts through the cloud service and process the raw data using EC2 instances, saving millions in infrastructure costs.
AWS Ground Station and Azure Orbital Ground Station provide managed access to satellite ground antennas and scheduling for downlink/uplink. Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud do not offer a direct, first-party equivalent ground-station service; customers typically use partners or integrate with third-party ground networks.