Norway’s new maritime monitoring microsatellite starts operations

Norway is leading Europe when it comes to ways to keep track of merchant shipping passing near its shoreline.

Canada’s Space Flight Laboratory (SFL) has recently launched and deployed Norway’s NorSat-4 maritime monitoring microsatellite. The seventh spacecraft developed for the Norwegian Space Agency (NOSA) by SFL, NorSat-4 carries a fifth-generation Automatic Identification System (AIS) ship tracking receiver and a first-of-its-kind low-light imaging camera.

“NorSat-4 maintains Norway’s leadership in space-based maritime situational awareness with a cost-effective small satellite program,” said SFL director Dr Robert E. Zee. “The addition of the low-light imaging camera on this mission continues the NOSA tradition of testing cutting-edge onboard technology.”

The low-light optical camera expands the Norwegian Coastal Administration’s ability to detect and track vessels in its Arctic territorial waters by supplementing the AIS receiver aboard the satellite. Some ships at sea deactivate their AIS transmitters or spoof the signals with incorrect location/identity data for nefarious reasons. Safran Reosc of France built the camera under contract with the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment to optically detect vessels longer than 30 meters in Arctic darkness.

Splash reported yesterday on 24-year-old student, Jesper Johnsen Loe, who has recently launched MaritimAlarm.no, a website that monitors civilian Russian ship activity in and around Norway, with the aim of uncovering potential threats to Norwegian infrastructure.

The website now also shows ships from the shadow fleet. The ships are displayed in real-time, and their position and activity can trigger alarms. An alarm is triggered if a vessel either stays within one nautical mile of infrastructure for more than one hour, or stops transmitting AIS data for more than one hour. An alarm is also triggered if a ship has a speed of 2-5 knots for more than 30 minutes.