COM DEV International Ltd. (TSX:CDV) has established a subsidiary company, exactEarth Ltd., for the purpose of offering advanced space-based Automatic Identification System (AIS-S) data services to competent maritime authorities around the world.
exactEarth will launch its first three AIS microsatellites, which are currently under construction in Canada and Europe, and will begin providing its exactAIS service within the year. exactAIS will require no changes to existing on-board vessel equipment or procedures, and will provide customers with both standard and custom interfaces to their existing AIS displays. Over 70,000 ships worldwide are already equipped with Class A AIS transmitters, but the curvature of the Earth limits reception of the signals to approximately 50 nautical miles for terrestrial-based receivers. Collection of the transmissions from space will offer countries unprecedented visibility into the activities of vessels nearing or destined for their shores or travelling in environmentally sensitive areas. The system is highly secure since all links starting from the satellites all the way to the end users are encrypted and the data sets are only provided to authorized competent maritime authorities.
exactEarth is currently deploying the global infrastructure to support the planned satellites, including multiple Earth stations, a secure data centre, an operations centre and processing, analysis, archiving and distribution software. These capabilities will be in place to support the exactAIS service launch next year and are being deployed in partnership with leading players in Europe, Asia and North America. exactAIS will achieve a high rate of detection through exactEarth’s patent-pending method of “de-colliding” the transmissions received simultaneously from Class A AIS transponders on the many thousands of ships that may be within a satellite’s 5,000 kilometer field of view at any given time. Furthermore, the polar orbit of the satellites will enable them to provide coverage over the entire surface of the globe including the polar regions. With trial data from selected areas available today, exactEarth plans to expand exactAIS in phases beginning in the first half of 2010. Subsequent phases of the service are expected to feature further improvements in update rates as the exactEarth constellation incorporates additional satellites.
Parent company COM DEV International Ltd. has already invested and committed over CDN$30 million towards this venture and has allied with strategic partners in Europe and Asia. COM DEV also has a supporting contract from the Canadian Government to build an advanced demonstration microsatellite called M3MSat (Maritime Monitoring and Messaging Microsatellite) which incorporates a second generation AIS payload and a Low Data Rate (LDR) payload for maritime applications. This satellite is expected to be the most advanced of its kind when launched in 2011.
