The International Space Station is joining the cause for wildlife conservation by finding scientific ways to track animals.
In 2018, Russian astronauts installed a large antenna and other equipment in the outpost in space. The system will hopefully relay data of tracking technologies that tracks an animal’s location, as well as its physiology and environment. This new information will help scientists and conservationists to closely monitor different wildlife species and understand the health of the world’s ecosystems.
The new approach is called International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space or ICARUS.
ICARUS will allow biologists and wildlife managers to monitor and track flocks of birds at a time and even the smallest creatures like insects. Biologists will be able to quickly respond to changes in where and when species migrate, according to a New York Times report.
“It’s a new era of discovery,” Walter Jets, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale, told The New York Times in an interview. “We will discover new migration that we didn’t even think about. That discovery will bring about all sorts of new questions.”
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