Space IoT is a never ending story! German start-up Talos, apparently founded in 2022, plans to launch a satellite constellation dedicated to animal tracking. 5 satellites are planned to start operations in 2025. The company focuses on the terminal which is “approximately 19x25x10 mm and 5 gramms of weight”. WHile the company focuses on wildlife and livestock tracking, it also mentions logistics applications (the usual asset tracking stuff). Talos is the continuation of the Icarus project which demonstrated animal tracking with a payload on the ISS (in the Russian part of the station) that faced some problems.
While Icarus was a great concept idea, turning this into a viable business will be more challenging. In addition, many technicalities remain unclear. For example, Icarus used the 468MHz frequency band which might not be available for such applications. In addition, Icarus was a store and forward demonstrator while logistics required more real-time data…
Good luck to the project of course as biotelemetry is a great application but it will surely require innovative financing!
AI image generated with Copilot ; prompt: “An image of animals on earth being tracked by a satellite in the sky”