Saving elephants’ lives from space. Students find feasible solution

Rangers could have a new ally in the war against ivory trafficking, after a group of university students designed a satellite that would track African elephants.

Students based at the ESA Academy Training and Learning Centre in Redu, Belgium, had four days to design a space mission with the aim to track elephants from orbit. According to an ESA press release, their design incorporated two satellites in a dawn dusk Sun-synchronous orbit, allowing for rapid revisiting times of key areas on Earth where the elephants would be travelling. The satellites would make use of telescopes of Gregorian design – and a “whisk broom” scanning method imaging areas would be selected by moving a mirror, rather than by slewing the satellite.

“It was fascinating to be part of an actual satellite designing team and have to deal with the different subsystems to make the project evolve. It was sometimes stressful and frustrating to fit the timing and demands of the other teams with ours, but we felt a huge accomplishment at the end,” a Portuguese student from ISAE-SUPAERO said.

ESA experts concluded that the design was indeed feasible, and with a few more iterations could be optimised further. It was even suggested that this could form the basis of a future educational Concurrent Engineering Workshop. The Concurrent Design Facility (CDF) is a state-of-the-art facility equipped with a network of computers, multimedia devices and software tools, which allows a team of experts from several disciplines to apply the concurrent engineering method to the design of future space missions.

African elephants are powerful animals, and an inspiring sight for anyone fortunate enough to see them in the wild. Unfortunately, their huge ivory tusks are prized by poachers. Ivory trade is internationally prohibited, but poachers nonetheless manage to find people willing to pay large sums of money for precious ivory on the black market. If this continues, African elephants could disappear from the wild within just a few decades. The war against ivory trafficking is fought on many fronts, and rangers are in the frontline.

Recently, the European Commission adopted new measures that will help to prevent that legal ivory trade fuels international ivory trafficking, which has risen significantly over the last decade.

According to the European Commission, the legal export of old ivory items from the EU to Asia has risen since 2012 to a level where it could fuel the global demand for ivory and be used as a cover for illegal ivory trade. In particular ivory tusks, which represent the largest share of trafficked ivory.

It is estimated that between 20,000 and 30,000 African elephants are poached every year. Ivory seizures amount to more than 40 tonnes in 2015. The rising demand for ivory products in Asia is one of the main reasons for this surge in trafficking.