The University of Sydney (USYD) has dramatically accelerated its satellite communications capabilities and reduced infrastructure costs through a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), achieving a thousand-fold increase in data transfer speeds. The university deployed its system in two months, significantly faster than the six to twelve months initially projected.
To establish reliable satellite communications, USYD utilizes AWS Ground Station, a fully managed service providing on-demand access to a global network of ground stations. This eliminates the demand for the university to construct and maintain its own physical infrastructure. The university connects to its satellites via S-band from the AWS Ground Station facility located in Dubbo, Australia, gaining low-latency access to AWS services within the region and ensuring consistent satellite coverage.
Satellite data is processed on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), leveraging secure, scalable compute capacity that operates only during satellite passes. This approach minimizes costs by processing data immediately before and after each communication contact. Processed data is then stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service designed for virtually unlimited data storage and retrieval. This allows research teams and commercial partners to securely access the data for payload performance testing and satellite health monitoring.
USYD maintains a dual-system approach to ensure operational resilience. A UHF/VHF radio system handles satellite control commands, while AWS Ground Station manages the high-volume data downloads. The collaboration with AWS also navigated Australia’s complex radio licensing requirements, ensuring the university’s compliance with local standards for satellite communications.
The new architecture has not only improved mission resilience but also facilitated faster access to satellite data, enabling payload teams to test onboard technologies for both research and commercial applications. The university avoided between 100,000 and 300,000 Australian dollars in infrastructure costs through the AWS partnership. The Satellogic EarthView dataset is now openly accessible via the Registry of Open Data on AWS, offering scalable access to high-resolution satellite imagery, with AWS covering the costs of storage and data transfer through its Open Data Sponsorship Program.
SkyWatch, a platform for accessing pre-processed Earth observation satellite data, also utilizes AWS services, including Step Functions, to reduce data processing time by a factor of three. The Registry of Open Data on AWS currently lists 13 datasets tagged with satellite imagery, and is now discoverable on AWS Data Exchange alongside over 3,000 other data products.
