CCSDS-compliant ingestion · SOC 2 Type II

Telemetry that arrives when the orbit says so.

Helion Aerospace runs the ingest, decoding and planning layer for small satellite operators. Connect a ground station, keep every packet addressable, and let Mission Control schedule the passes your spacecraft actually gets.

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Ground stations

99.98%

Ingest uptime

190 ms

Median packet latency

3.1 B

Packets processed

Two products, one spacecraft model

Telemetry Hub moves the bytes. Mission Control decides who talks to the spacecraft and when. Both read the same spacecraft registry, so a pass planned in the browser is the same pass the ingest pipeline reserves bandwidth for.

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Ingest

Telemetry Hub

Ingests CCSDS transport frames and Space Packet Protocol payloads from any station, decodes them against your mission dictionary, and stores them as addressable CDF, CSV or Parquet objects. Retries are idempotent, gaps are recorded rather than hidden, and every archive is queryable with the same SQL you would write against a warehouse.

CCSDS 133.0-B transport frames, CCSDS 133.0-B space packets
Secondary header, CRC and sequence counters validated on write
Object storage in AWS, GCP or any S3-compatible endpoint

Telemetry Hub →

Operations

Mission Control

Holds the schedule: contact windows computed from your propagator of choice, uplink command queues, downlink priority, and the alert rules that decide who gets woken up. Roles, audit trails and approval gates are built in, because a spacecraft operator with one person and one satellite still needs a change log.

Contact windows from SGP4, two-line elements or analytic propagation
Command approval workflow with dual control for critical actions
Alert rules on telemetry thresholds, gaps and pass loss

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How a packet becomes queryable

Three steps, no proprietary format in the middle. Everything Helion stores can be exported raw, and every raw frame we accept is retrievable byte for byte.

Station connects

A ground station streams transport frames over the SLE or UDP link it already uses. Helion accepts a station key, authenticates it with mutual TLS, and opens a stream within one round trip. Nothing needs to be reconfigured on the antenna side.

Frames are decoded

The primary header, the secondary header and the payload are split apart. A packet's APID, sequence counter and source spacecraft are resolved against the mission dictionary you registered, so a parameter lands in the right table with the right units.

Data is written

Decoded values are committed to a columnar store and the raw frame is written to object storage. Queries hit the columnar copy; the raw frame is the record of truth, retained for 90 days on every plan and longer where you need it.

Block diagram of the Helion ground segment: RF terminal, baseband, ingest and platform stages — Fig. 1 — Ground segment block diagram. HA-GS-0071 rev B.

Built around the standards your flight team already uses

Telemetry Hub does not ask you to change how you build a spacecraft. Frames arrive as they leave the antenna. If you already emit CCSDS space packets with a PUS-like secondary header, the APID map in your mission dictionary does the rest. If you emit something older, an ingest adapter converts it at the edge, and the conversion is logged.

Every write is validated before it is committed. A frame whose CRC fails is rejected with a reason code, a frame whose sequence counter jumps is stored and flagged as a gap, and a frame whose APID is not in the dictionary is written to an unmapped bucket rather than dropped. Operators in the field have lost enough data to silence to know that dropped frames are worse than flagged ones.

190 ms

Median ingest latency

99.98 %

Rolling 90-day uptime

4.2 M

Packets per day

12 sites

Ground stations

Visibility map showing coverage zones over the North Atlantic with ground station markers — Fig. 2 — Visibility zones at a 10° elevation mask. HA-CM-0033 rev D.

Coverage you can plan against

Every Helion plan includes the full contact window catalogue for the included ground segments. Windows are computed per station from a propagated ephemeris and are re-published whenever the orbit model changes, so a pass that moved by forty seconds in the morning is not a surprise in the evening.

For operators flying outside the included footprint, the same window model runs against your own passes: upload an ephemeris file, pick the stations you have access to, and Helion computes acquisition of signal, loss of signal and the usable arc in between. Overlapping arcs are shown as separate windows because a 4.2-degree overlap at the horizon is not two usable passes, it is one pass with a disputed boundary.

SGP4 Two-line elements Analytic propagation Orbital elements API

Built for operators, not for demos

The platform runs on the same code paths in production that we exercise in testing, including the failure cases.

01 / INGEST

Idempotent writes

A replayed frame with the same spacecraft, APID and sequence counter is recognised and dropped at the edge. Retries after a network partition never produce duplicate parameter samples.

02 / STORAGE

Raw plus derived

Decoded values live in a columnar store for query speed. The untouched transport frame lives in object storage as the authoritative copy, so a decoder bug is fixable without a second pass of the spacecraft.

03 / PLANNING

Windows from real ephemerides

Contact windows are computed from the elements you upload, at the stations you name, with your elevation mask applied. Nothing is estimated from a nominal orbit unless you ask for a nominal orbit.

04 / ACCESS

Roles that mean something

Owner, operator, viewer and automation roles with per-spacecraft grants. Command approval can require a second person for anything marked critical, and every grant change is written to an audit log.

05 / ALERTING

Thresholds in engineering units

Rules are written against decoded parameters with units attached, not against raw frame counts. A rule that says "battery bus voltage below 27.4 V" behaves the way an engineer expects it to behave.

06 / EXPORT

Leave when you want to

CDF, CSV and Parquet exports to any bucket you control, on a schedule or on demand. There is no export fee and no throttling on bulk retrieval for operators on an annual plan.

“We moved four spacecraft off a spreadsheet and a shared drive in one weekend. The part that mattered was not the dashboard; it was that the gaps were finally visible.”

Flight software lead, 3-satellite EO operator

“Our pass schedule used to be a PDF somebody regenerated on Sundays. Now the window catalogue is the source of truth and the schedule falls out of it.”

Ground segment manager, 11-spacecraft constellation