Ursa Space and Unseenlabs partner to support maritime stakeholders in dark vessel detection

Ursa Space Systems and Unseenlabs will provide innovative maritime surveillance solutions to government and commercial actors to combat illegal activities, better understand vessel behavior and ensure maritime security and safety, thanks to a partnership agreement announced today.

Ursa Space Systems, a geospatial analytics orchestrator, and Unseenlabs, a world leader in satellite borne Radio Frequency1 (RF) ELINT/SIGINT technology, are combining their capabilities for exhaustive and realistic maritime reporting. RF sensing and detection provides the most up- to-date maritime traffic data, particularly ships which vanish from conventional tracking systems by turning off their cooperative beacons (AIS), otherwise known as going ‘dark’.

Today’s announcement at Euroconsult’s 25th annual World Satellite Business Week event in Paris enables enhanced maritime traffic monitoring in specific areas of interest. RF data from Unseenlabs correlated with synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data from Ursa Space is critical in object detection, which provides an enhanced level of accuracy in maritime domain awareness.

“We have a common mission with Ursa Space: to shed light on the dark places of our oceans, and help our customers with reliable and actionable information from all points on Earth. We are very excited about this partnership that will expand our capacity to deliver even more customers. We look forward to joining forces with Ursa Space to generate valuable satellite detection data and deliver new RF-based applications to major commercial and Government markets," said Clement Galic, CEO and co-founder of Unseenlabs.

“Partnering with Unseenlabs advances our maritime detection services, providing additional information we can incorporate within our industry leading catalog of imagery, analytics, and data fusion techniques. As a result, our customers have an even more resilient, robust, and accurate set of maritime insights that meet and exceed their requirements” said Eric Cote, Director of Data & Analytic Services at Ursa Space Systems.

Ursa Space leverages the world’s most comprehensive and progressive virtual constellation from multiple commercial sources and advanced data fusion capabilities, providing insights into physical changes on Earth. Ursa’s platform orchestrates satellite imagery and analytic services at scale, to rapidly deliver to customers insights when needed.

Unseenlabs is building the world's largest constellation of RF monosatellites. Unseenlabs’ constellation is designed to provide clients with data to follow maritime traffic, regardless of the time of day and weather conditions in broad areas of interest, Unseenlabs’ processes and analyzes this RF data and provides unique knowledge for national security operations, for environmental protection, and for an increasing number of applications in the commercial sector.

The French company has deployed seven satellites since 2019 and is on track to launch additional satellites by the end of 2022.