Harnessing Animals’ Intelligence from Space

Over millennia, animals have adapted their behaviour to Earth’s unique range of ecosystems and developed advanced senses and instincts as a result. By tracking animal movements and activity patterns through a constellation of satellites, TALOS aims to provide insights into animal behaviour to complement Earth observation data for various markets.

The solution includes multiple cubesats with IoT payloads connected to lightweight tags attached to a variety of animals. The collected data includes location, altitude, acceleration, temperature, humidity and barometric pressure, providing valuable information with broad applications for understanding the impacts of climate change, tracking biodiversity loss and detecting animal and zoonotic diseases.

Developed and tested as part of the Max Planck Institute’s ICARUS initiative, the project aims to refine the payload technology for compatibility with even smaller cubesats to turn the successful research surrounding the ICARUS initiative into a viable commercial product.

Benefits:

• Monitoring animal movements and migration patterns from space
• Bi-directional communication between low-Earth orbit cubesats and miniature, lightweight animal tags
• Insight into the effects of climate change, tracking of biodiversity loss and detection of animal and zoonotic diseases
• Applications for wildlife tracking, livestock monitoring, weather information technologies and wildfire detection