The German-Russian project Icarus will allow you to monitor wildlife from space. With the ISS, it will be possible not only to understand the migrations of fauna representatives but also to predict natural disasters and epidemics. By the end of the year, upon completion of the test phase, the system will be available to scientists.
Using the Icarus space-based surveillance system, biologists will significantly expand their knowledge of migrations in the wild. For this, the astronauts mounted a 130-kilogram antenna in the ISS Russian segment, and data on the vital activity of representatives of the fauna from sensors mounted on their bodies will be received on it. Then the information will be processed by the on-board computer, and the Russian cosmonauts will send it back to the researchers to the Earth. Space technology will shed light on many aspects of animal life: what paths they walk on, under what conditions they live, and how best to protect them. In the near future, tens of thousands of animals will be taken to "space" control. And the results of the research will be placed in a data bank open to specialists anywhere in the world.
Icarus is a joint project of Roscosmos, the German Center for Aviation and Cosmonautics (DLR) and the Society named after Max Planck, who has been preparing for 18 years. The sonorous name stands for "International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space". At the disposal of biologists, the monitoring complex will arrive at the end of the year, but for now, the German-Russian team is testing the operation of system components. First, it is planned to check how the information from the sensors through the ISS arrives at the station on Earth: by measuring the background noise in the frequency range, experts will find out where signal transmission can be difficult. Following this, the transmitter will be connected to the ISS, with which chips for animals will be programmed. At the final stage, the German engineers from SpaceTech together with their Russian colleagues from RSC Energia will determine which regions of the Earth will fall within the range of the ISS antenna.
"Icarus works where there are no cell phones — in the mountains, oceans, deserts, in the wilderness and on agricultural fields," says project manager Martin Wikelski of the Institute for the Study of Animal Behavior of the Society named after Max Planck. The receiver rotates at an altitude of 400 kilometres above the Earth and covers more than 90% of its surface. Radiofrequency communication with the ISS allows real-time viewing of thousands of living creatures equipped with tracking marks. Since the ISS makes a complete revolution around the Earth every 90 minutes, the transmitters will not have a chance to be out of the reception range for a long time.
So far, there was no talk of such a global reach, since mobile or analogue communication technologies were used to monitor the behaviour of animals. “When, for example, white storks fly from Africa over the seas, about 30% of the birds are lost. We assume that they die, but we don’t know when, where and why,” Martin Wickelski explains the revolutionary significance of his brainchild.
An international team of scientists managed to develop a fundamentally new model of sensors or beacons for animals. Instruments weighing only 5 grams are equipped with GPS, accelerometer, magnetometer, temperature, pressure and humidity sensors. This set allows you to track not only the coordinates of the animal but also its body temperature, speed and direction of movement. In the future, sensors will also be equipped with solar panels. And by 2025, the beacons will be improved to such an extent that they can be mounted even on the body of the locusts. However, Icarus is already being tested on such relatively small creatures as turtles, bats or parrots.
The scientific equipment of the Icarus project is integrated with the hardware complex of the Russian space experiment “Hurricane” conducted at the ISS, aimed at detecting, studying and predicting natural and human-made disasters. Russian technology will create a system for early prediction of natural disasters based on the observation and analysis of migrations in the wild. In addition, epidemiologists will receive information on the spread of diseases transmitted from animals to humans.
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