ESAIL

ESAIL was a small satellite developed by the European Space Agency in partnership with LuxSpace and ExactEarth. Its objective was worldwide tracking of ships using their automatic identification systems for fisheries monitoring, fleet management, environmental protection, and security monitoring. The satellite was launched in September 2020 on the Vega flight VV16 from Guiana Space Centre. In a record-breaking technology demonstration, the satellite managed to process more than 2,000,000 messages from 70,000 different ships in a single day, representing a 15% to 20% improvement over previous satellites.