Orbital Ground · Infrastructure
Ground stations as a service.
Orbital Ground is being built to bring telemetry from many ground stations into one control hub: connectors at each station, a gateway that routes and authenticates, and a hub for mission control. It comes with containerised station designs to run it in. It is in development.
- Status
- In development
- Layer
- Infrastructure
- Telemetry formats
- CCSDS, AX.25, KISS
- Station design
- ISO 40ft high-cube container
Many stations, many formats. One place to run them.
A ground station network is radios, computers and power spread across sites, often run by different operators. Each station speaks the formats its hardware and missions use, such as CCSDS space packets, AX.25 or KISS frames.
Orbital Ground is being built to read those streams at the station, standardise them and route them to one control hub, while each site decides what it shares with the others.
What it does
Connectors
Run at each station. They parse CCSDS space packets, AX.25 and KISS frames, and pass standardised telemetry on.Gateway
Routes telemetry and requests between stations and services, and authenticates callers, including through Orbital Passport.Sync
Shares data between sites under sharing policies, so each site decides what leaves it.Hub
A mission-control dashboard with live telemetry, the services it manages and device provisioning.
Orbital Ground is in development. Related in the portfolio: Orbital Passport, which the gateway uses for authentication, and Orbital Twin, digital twins for satellites.
One container, five bays.
Each station design fits inside a standard ISO 40ft high-cube shipping container, divided into five bays from end to end.
NOC
Operator positions and displays.Compute
Racks for processing and storage.RF
Radios, converters, amplifiers and a reference clock.Power
A battery store behind an automatic transfer switch.HVAC + I/O
Cooling, and the shore power, data and fibre connections.
Configurations range from a single tracking dish for low Earth orbit to ground-mounted dishes for GEO and MEO links. The design details are shared through the station viewer.
See the station designs.
An interactive 3D viewer of the station designs is available by access code. It asks for your name, your email and the code.
Questions
Is Orbital Ground available?
Not yet. It is in development.
Which telemetry formats does it read?
CCSDS space packets, AX.25 and KISS. Connectors are plugins, so other formats can be added.
How do I see the station viewer?
Write to [email protected] and ask for an access code. The viewer asks for your name, your email and the code.
Running ground stations?
Tell the team which stations, bands and telemetry formats you work with.