Communication & Infrastructure

Latency is the friction between observation and action.

What Belongs Here

<ul><li>Downlink, ground stations, scheduling, pipelines</li><li>Latency budgets end-to-end</li><li>Onboard processing and what it changes</li></ul>

Start Here

Latency: From Orbit to Application COM-001 Latency in satellite systems is the total time between a sensor observing something on Earth and that observation becoming usable information. It is not one delay — it is a chain of them. Propagation through space, queuing at ground stations, decryption, format conversion, atmospheric correction, reprojection, tiling, indexing, and delivery. Some links are governed by physics and cannot be shortened. Others are engineering choices. Understanding where latency lives determines what questions you can answer with the data. A flood map delivered in 15 minutes can direct evacuations. The same map delivered in 48 hours is a historical record.

Key Concepts

Contact windows: Geometry as schedule.
Pipelines: Where "real-time" usually dies.
Onboard compute: Changes what "data" even is.

All Entries

Latency: From Orbit to Application COM-001 Latency in satellite systems is the total time between a sensor observing something on Earth and that observation becoming usable information. It is not one delay — it is a chain of them. Propagation through space, queuing at ground stations, decryption, format conversion, atmospheric correction, reprojection, tiling, indexing, and delivery. Some links are governed by physics and cannot be shortened. Others are engineering choices. Understanding where latency lives determines what questions you can answer with the data. A flood map delivered in 15 minutes can direct evacuations. The same map delivered in 48 hours is a historical record.

Coming Next

Ground stations & contact windows, Inter-satellite links and relay networks, Onboard processing & compression

Related Domains

Satellites & Platforms Data & Architecture

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