Schedule a contact

Schedule a contact with your satellite for data retrieval and delivery on Azure Orbital Ground Station. At the scheduled time, the selected ground station will contact the spacecraft and start data retrieval/delivery using the designated contact profile. Learn more about contact resources.

Contacts are created on a per-pass and per-site basis. If you already know the pass timings for your spacecraft and desired ground station, you can directly proceed to schedule the pass with these times. The service will succeed in creating the contact resource if the window is available and fail if the window is unavailable.

If you don't know your spacecraft's pass timings or which ground station sites are available, you can use the Azure portal or Azure Orbital Ground Station API to query for available contact opportunities and use the results to schedule your passes accordingly.

Method	List available contacts	Schedule contacts	Notes
Portal	Yes	Yes	Custom pass timings aren't supported. You must use the results from the query.
API	Yes	Yes	Custom pass timings are supported.

Prerequisites

• An Azure account with an active subscription. Create an account for free.
• Contributor permissions at the subscription level.
• A registered and authorized spacecraft resource. Learn more on how to register a spacecraft.
• A contact profile with links in accordance with the spacecraft resource above. Learn more on how to configure a contact profile.

Azure portal method

1. Sign in to the Azure portal - Orbital.

2. In the Azure portal search box, enter Spacecraft. Select Spacecraft in the search results.

3. In the Spacecraft page, select the spacecraft for the contact.

4. Select Schedule contact on the top bar of the spacecraft’s overview.

   

5. In the Schedule contact page, specify this information from the top of the page:

   Field	Value
   Contact profile	Specify the contact profile to be used for the contact
   Ground station	Specify the ground station(s) to be used for the contact
   Start time	Identify a start time for the contact availability window
   End time	Identify an end time for the contact availability window

   

6. Select Search to view available contact times.

7. Select one or more contact windows and select Schedule.

   

8. View scheduled contacts by selecting the spacecraft page, and navigating to Contacts.

   

Note

The new contact resource includes two properties: Provisioning State and Contact Status.

Provisioning state is the current state of the resource's creation, deletion, or modification in Azure.

Contact Status is the execution status of the contact resource. Values include scheduled, cancelled, providerCancelled, succeeded, and failed.

The value of these properties can be found under the Essentials section of the contact overview page.

API method

Use the Contacts REST Operation Group to create a contact with the Azure Orbital Ground Station API.

Next steps

• Register Spacecraft
• Configure a contact profile