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exactEarth joins Mayflower Autonomous Ship Project

By Eric Van Rees - 14th May 2020 - 06:55

exactEarth Limited, a provider of Satellite AIS data services, has joined an international effort to build an unmanned, fully autonomous transatlantic research vessel that is set to launch on the fourth centenary of the original Mayflower voyage. exactEarth joins an illustrious international project team led by ProMare and its technology partner, IBM.

The Mayflower Autonomous Ship (MAS) mission will not only commemorate the original Mayflower crossing, but also advance technologies that could transform the shipping industry and help gather critical data about the ocean.

exactEarth will contribute two of its services to the MAS project:

• exactAIS: the supply of live satellite AIS data into the mission’s operations centre, where this data will augment the local AIS picture collected by the ship’s onboard AIS transceiver by providing a real-time over-the horizon view throughout the voyage.

• exactSeNS: the use of exactEarth’s VHF-based M2M satellite communications service to upload sensor data in real-time from the ship’s on-board weather station, via an exactEarth-supplied on-board transmitter.

The exactAIS data service provides flexible access to all the AIS messages captured by exactView™ RT, the Company’s second-generation satellite constellation. exactView RT consists of 58 operational payloads and seven orbital spares that were designed and built by L3Harris Corporation and that are hosted onboard the Iridium NEXT constellation of satellites, which is owned and operated by Iridium Communications Inc. exactView RT tracks a population of more than 500,000 unique vessels worldwide and generates Average Global Revisit rates and Average Latency rates of less than one minute.

Read More: Marine Surveying Marine Navigation Marine

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