AISSat-4 Maritime Monitoring

The Norwegian Space Agency (NOSA) has contracted SFL Missions Inc. to develop the AISSat-4 maritime ship tracking microsatellite for launch in less than one year. AISSat-4 is needed to expand operational capacity in Norway’s maritime situational awareness network. AISSat-4 will have the capacity to capture 1.5 million unique AIS signals every day even in crowded shipping lanes.

AISSat-4 is being developed on SFL’s SPARTAN 6U nanosatellite platform and will carry a single payload – a miniaturized Automatic Identification System (AIS) receiver built by Kongsberg Seatex of Trondheim, Norway.

SFL Missions is uniquely prepared to develop AISSat-4 on an accelerated schedule with extensive experience implement AIS missions. Additionally, the SPARTAN platform relies on heritage hardware and software and is easily tailored to accommodate the AIS receiver and antennas. More broadly, SFL Missions has the capacity to work on many satellite missions concurrently, and since the team is vertically integrated, it maintains full control over the subsystem and spacecraft level assembly, integration, and testing schedules. 

Norway launched the first ship-tracking satellite of its operational AISSat series in 2010 and then funded a parallel series of larger NorSat microsatellites. While the smaller AISSat nanosatellites each carry a single payload focused solely on collection of AIS signals, the NorSats each operate a ship-tracking device along with one or more technology demonstration payloads.

Norway’s leadership in space-based maritime monitoring includes eight spacecraft spanning more than 15 years, all of which were developed with SFL.