The Ground Segment: Downlink, Relays and Latency
How do images get from satellites to users, what does it cost, and how are relays changing latency?
Chapter summary
EO satellites downlink data to ground stations when they pass over them, so delivery speed depends on how many stations an operator can use and where they are.
Key takeaways
- 1
Commercial ground-station networks (KSAT, AWS Ground Station, ATLAS, Leaf Space, others) sell antenna time by the minute, letting operators avoid building their own.
- 2
Polar stations (Svalbard, Antarctica) see polar-orbiting satellites on almost every orbit.
- 3
The next step is relaying data through other satellites, by optical links to relay constellations, so that an image can reach the user within minutes wherever it was taken.
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