ESAIL 2 Years in orbit

The AIS receiver mounted onboard the ESAIL satellite receives more than two millionen messages from 70.000 ships in a single day

On september 3, the microsatelliten ESAIL was launched into space from the European spaceport in Kourou.

ESAIL is the first satellit from ESA´s SAT-AIS programm, that can be used to observe shipping traffic worldwide.

From space, ESAIL observes ships that have previously been equipped with the positioning system AIS (Automatic Identification System). This allows to avoid collisions between ships, routes being monitored and environmental crimes being combated.

First, the platform was build by LuxSpace with the support from several, samll European companies. Next, the the data reception and processing of the ships’ automatic identification systems were validated by ESAIL’s Canadian operator exactEarth. Hereby ESAIL collected more than two million messages from 70.000 different ships in a single day. This is 15 % - 20 % more than satellites have been able to detect.

STT has developed and delivered the high-rate DVB-S2 payload data downlink communication system (C-Band) and is proud to be involved in the success of this very important and innovative mission. Since this, the AIS raw data is delivered to the ground station for further processing by the most modern DVB-S2 over CCSDS modulation.

More information about The ESAIL microsatellite: https://www.esa.int/Applications/Telecommunications_Integrated_Applications/ESAIL_captures_two_million_messages_from_ships_at_sea

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