ESAIL

ESAIL was a small satellite developed by the European Space Agency (ESA) in partnership with LuxSpace and ExactEarth.^[1][2][3] Its objective was worldwide tracking of ships using their automatic identification systems (AIS)^[4][5][6] for fisheries monitoring, fleet management, environmental protection, and security monitoring.^[7][8][9] The satellite was launched in September 2020 on the Vega flight VV16 from Guiana Space Centre.^{[10][11][12][13][14]} In a record-breaking technology demonstration, the satellite managed to process more than 2,000,000 messages from 70,000 different ships in a single day, representing a 15% to 20% improvement over previous satellites.^[15][16][17]