A cloud service that lets you communicate with orbiting satellites to collect, process, and downlink data — without building your own satellite dish infrastructure. Like renting a radio tower that can talk to space, ground station services handle the complex antennas and signal processing so you can focus on using the data. AWS Ground Station provides on-demand access to satellite antennas at locations worldwide, Azure Orbital Ground Station connects to spacecraft and satellite constellations, and specialized providers offer similar capabilities for Earth observation, weather monitoring, and communications.
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.