Satellite onboarding

Onboarding a satellite into AWS Ground Station is a multistep process involving data collection, technical validation, spectrum licensing, with integration and testing. The Satellite onboarding section of the guide will walk you through this process.

Mission profile composition

The satellite frequency information, data plane information, and other details are encapsulated into a mission profile. The mission profile is a collection of config components. This allows you to reuse config components across different mission profiles as suits your use case. Since mission profiles don't directly reference individual satellites, but instead only have information about their technical capabilities, mission profiles can also be reused by multiple satellites that have the same configuration. A valid mission profile will have a tracking config and one or more dataflows . The tracking config will specify your preference for tracking during a contact. Each config pair within a dataflow establishes a source and destination. Depending on your satellite and its operational modes, the exact number of dataflows will vary in a mission profile to represent your uplink and downlink communication paths as well as any data processing aspects. For more information on configuring your Amazon VPC, Amazon S3, and Amazon EC2 resources that will be used during a contact, see Dataflows . For details on how each config behaves, see Config . For specific details on all parameters expected, see Mission Profile . For examples on how various mission profiles can be created to support your use case, see Example mission profile configurations . The diagram below is used to show an example mission profile and additional resources needed. Note that the example shows a dataflow endpoint which is not needed for this mission profile, named unusedEndpoint , to demonstrate the flexibility. The example supports the following dataflows: Synchronous downlink of digital intermediate frequency data to an Amazon EC2 instance that you manage. Denoted by the name digIfDownlink . Asynchronous downlink of digital intermediate frequency data to an Amazon S3 bucket. Denoted by the bucket name aws-groundstation-demo . Synchronous downlink of demodulated and decoded data to an Amazon EC2 instance that you manage. Denoted by the name demodDecodeDownlink . Synchronous uplink of data from an Amazon EC2 instance that you manage to a AWS Ground Station managed antenna. Denoted by the name digIfUplink . With a valid mission profile, you can request a contact with your onboarded satellites. The contact reservation request is asynchronous to allow time for the global antenna service to achieve a consistent schedule across all AWS Regions involved. During this process, various antennas at the requested ground station location are evaluated to determine if they are available and capable to process the contact. During this process, your configured dataflow endpoints are also evaluated to determine their availability. While this evaluation is occurring, the contact status will be in SCHEDULING. This asynchronous scheduling process will finish within five minutes of the request, but typically finishes within one minute. Please review Automating AWS Ground Station with Events for event-based monitoring during scheduling time. Contacts which can be performed and have availability result in SCHEDULED contacts. With a scheduled contact, the resources which are needed to perform your contact have been reserved across the needed AWS Regions as defined by your mission profile. Contacts which cannot be performed, or have unavailable parts will result in FAILED_TO_SCHEDULE contacts. See Troubleshooting FAILED_TO_SCHEDULE contacts for debugging details.

Contact execution

AWS Ground Station will automatically orchestrate your AWS managed resources during your contact reservation. If applicable, you are responsible for orchestrating EC2 resources defined by your mission profile as dataflow endpoints. AWS Ground Station provides AWS EventBridge Events for automating orchestration of your resources to reduce costs. See Automating AWS Ground Station with Events for more details. During the contact, telemetry about your contact performance is delivered to AWS CloudWatch. For information about how to monitor your contact during execution, please see Monitoring . The following diagram continues the previous example by showing the same resources orchestrated during the contact. Not all the antenna capabilities were used in this example. For instance, there are more than a dozen antenna downlink capabilities available at each antenna that support multiple frequencies and polarizations. For more details about the number of each capability type available from AWS Ground Station antennas, and their supported frequencies and polarizations, see AWS Ground Station Site Capabilities . At the end of your contact, AWS Ground Station will assess the performance of your contact and will determine a final contact status. Contacts where no errors are detected will result in a COMPLETED contact status. Contacts where service errors have caused data delivery issues during the contact will result in an AWS_FAILED status. Contacts where client or user errors have caused data delivery issues during the contact will result in a FAILED status. Errors outside a contact time,