Tracking ship traffic from orbit

The last decade saw the International Space Station established as humanity’s base camp in low orbit. Now the international space community is drawing up plans to go further, projecting human presence out into the Solar System through new robotic and manned missions.

Six intense months of work culminated in a self-steering rover charting its own course through Chile’s Mars-like Atacama Desert. Innovative R&D projects can be run in innovative ways: ESA’s long-running StarTiger initiative gathers together a highly able team and sets them a challenge, in this case to develop methods for a long-range rover to navigate its way across many kilometres of an alien planet’s surface. Codenamed ‘Seeker’, the project was led and hosted for ESA by the UK’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.

Astronauts on a long-duration space mission would need tonnes of food, water and oxygen with them to stay alive – if they rely on current life support technologies. But ESA’s Micro-Ecological Life Support System Alternative (MELiSSA) pilot plant at the University Autònoma of Barcelona is targeting the creation of a closed-loop life-support system with close to 100% efficiency: all food is grown and water and air recycled. At the moment, a ‘crew’ of rats are being kept alive; one element of the international long-term MELiSSA effort, coordinated by ESA. Terrestrial spin-offs include improved water purification and process control for wine-making.

The International Space Station is the ultimate space technology testbed, able to quickly investigate the potential of proposed space missions, such as satellites for global ship traffic monitoring. ESA’s Columbus module is testing a system to do just this, using Automatic Identification System signals.

ESA, together with European industry, is developing a space-based system to monitor maritime traffic on a worldwide basis. Tens of thousands of ships are crossing the oceans at any one time but they could be tracked with a constellation of as few as five satellites, by using advanced signal receiver technology.

The recent Shuttle mission to the International Space Station has brought ESA’s Columbus module a step nearer to beginning an ambitious experiment to track global maritime traffic from space.