SatNOGS Open Ground Station Project Adds Data Warehouse, Dashboard

"We want satellite graphs to be crowd-sourced and collaborative," explains Corey Shields. "We welcome you all to sign in to the dashboard, and if you would like to hack on your own graphs let us know and we will grant you privileges to do so."

The SatNOGS project, a free and open source effort to create a global network of satellite ground stations, has announced the release of the SatNOGS Dashboard software platform for analysis and display of captured data frames.

Founded in 2014 as part of the NASA SpaceApps Challenge in Athens, SatNOGS’ overall aim is to provide a suite of technologies based on free and open source licensing for the reception, storage, decoding, and analysis of satellite data using volunteer-driven ground stations located globally and communicating with each other in a collaborative network. With the release of the SatNOGS Dashboard and connected Data Warehouse system, it is a major step further towards its goal.

“This has been a long time coming,” writes SatNOGS’ Corey Shields in the launch announcement. “This is a time-series database where decoded telemetry and data from captured data frames can be stored and analysed. In this setup we are using influxdb as the database to hold telemetry, and grafana for the visualization layer. We want satellite graphs to be crowd-sourced and collaborative. We welcome you all to sign in to the dashboard, and if you would like to hack on your own graphs let us know and we will grant you privileges to do so.”

For those interested in creating their own dashboards, early documentation has been published to the SatNOGS Wiki. Shields has also called for contributors to the SatNOGS Decoders project, in order to expand the data which can be decoded, analysed, and displayed on the dashboards.

At present, the Data Warehouse contains data from its launch moving forward; Shields has indicated that historical data may become available in the future “as resources allow.”

The SatNOGS Dashboard is available now at dashboard.satnogs.org.