Friday, April 18, 2008

Trials of space-based AIS completed

COM DEV International has announced the successful completion of airborne validation trials of its advanced Automatic Identification System (AIS) receiver solution, which aimed to test the viability of tracking AIS signals from space.
COMDEV says that the trials have validated key aspects of system performance and demonstrated that the company's receiver solution is capable of extracting a "significantly greater" number of AIS signals compared to a standard receiver.
The company also says that the results suggest that such a system, employed in space, will provide a "persistent and predictable level of performance."
COM DEV is also currently completing the development of a nano-satellite which is being built by the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies/Space Flight Lab.
The spacecraft is said to be ready for launch in the spring of 2008, as planned, and will be deployed in the first space-based validation trial of an advanced AIS capability designed to deal with large numbers of overlapping AIS signals.
In addition to this, one of COM DEV's partners on the AIS project, Gatehouse, is developing software that will enable data collected from space to be displayed and managed as part of an integrated maritime domain awareness picture by adding the dimension of extended long-range monitoring capability.
COM DEV says it has received expressions of interest from a number of maritime agencies of nations that plan to assess the performance of the Advanced AIS system.

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