JULY 8,
2019
The
German-Russian observation system for animal movements, Icarus, will go into operation
on 10 July 2019. In the subsequent test phase, the Icarus engineers and
scientists will check the system components on the ground, on board the
International Space Station (ISS) and the transmitters that collect the
animals' data. After completion of all tests, Icarus is expected to be
available to the scientific community in autumn or winter 2019.
Icarus is
a cooperative project between the Russian space agency Roskosmos, the German
Aerospace Center (DLR), and the University of Konstanz under the leadership of
Martin Wikelski from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Constance.
With the space-based observation system, scientists want to find out more about
the life of animals on Earth: on which routes they migrate, under what
conditions they live and, above all, how they can best be protected.
The
researchers equip different animal species with miniature transmitters that
send their measurement data to a receiving station in space. The data is transmitted
to a ground station,
from where it is sent to the respective research teams. The results are
published in the Movebank database, which is freely accessible to everyone, and
in a counterpart developed by RKK Energia and the Institute of Geography of the
Russian Academy of Sciences (IG-RAS). The Icarus equipment supports the Russian
space research project Uragan (hurricane), which was developed to adapt Earth
observation hardware and methods and to observe potentially dangerous
phenomena. Uragan instruments are used to simultaneously observe the Earth's
surface to understand the migrations of animals and the reasons for their
changes.
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