SAN FRANCISCO – Through a partnership with Viasat Real-Time Earth, Atlas Space Operations will expand its antenna network and offer customers access to larger antennas, the company announced March 9.
Early this year, Atlas owned and operated antennas at 13 sites. Michigan-based company added 11 sites by joining forces with AWS Ground Stations. Viasat RTE brings another 10 antennas to Atlas’ network immediately and two more by the end of the year.
“Through our partnership with Viasat we are expanding the global footprint of our federated network and demonstrating the usefulness of software in the satcom marketplace,” Brad Bode, Atlas co-founder and chief technology officer, said in a statement.
Atlas, a ground-software-as-a-service company, developed the Freedom network management platform to facilitate satellite communications.
With Freedom, “we are able to extract far greater value from existing hardware without incurring additional costs,” Bode said. “Using software to create one common ground solution allows us to offer extensive capabilities atop data delivery. Most importantly for our clients, Freedom is flexible and accessible through our unified interface, which means as our federated network grows, new antennas are immediately available to clients without any software changes on their end.”
John Williams, Viasat RTE vice president, lauded the partnership with Atlas.
“Government customers flying a variety of assets appreciate the diversity of antennas available to them through a single interface, while commercial customers see the value in more antennas in different locations to significantly reduce the latency between data collection and data delivery,” Williams said in a statement.
Most antennas in the Viasat RTE network are 7.3 meters. Because that’s larger than Atlas’ traditional antennas, partners will have access to satellites in medium and geostationary orbit.
Atlas’ is gaining new antenna sites in Africa, Argentina, Dubai, Hawaii, New Mexico, Rwanda and South Africa.
