# ICARUS--Very Low Power Satellite-Based IoT
## 6 ICARUS Research on Animal Behavior  
Despite the substantial problems of sending data from a mobile animal, the ICARUS tags performed extremely well all around the globe [1]. We received data from all latitudes and longitudes within the orbit of the ISS (ca. 56 degrees), as well as archived GPS positions from animals that temporarily went outside (north or south of) the orbit of the ISS (see Figure 19), i.e., could not be read out by the antenna and receiver on the ISS for some time. Transmissions occurred from inside the rain forest, through heavy weather systems  
Figure 18: ICARUS uplink satellite antenna gain contour, color code: probability of successful packet reception. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c} \hline \hline
**Parameter** & **Value in 402.25 MHz** \\ \hline Chip rate & 900 kHz \\ Spreading factor & 1023 \\ Orbit height & 400 km (time varying) \\ Max. single-sided UL antenna opening angle & \(55^{\circ}\) \\ Max. Slant path (direction edge of coverage) & 872 km \\ Swath width & 800 km depending on ISS orbit height \\ UL tag EIRP & 8 dBm (derived from tag antenna chamber measurement campaigns) \\ UL tag antenna gain due to imperfect pointing & \(-1\) dBi \\ Satellite Rx antenna gain max & 4 dBi in bore sight (3 antenna elements each of \\  & a different backward tilt and off-track \\  & directivity) \\ Satellite Rx antenna gain edge of coverage & 1 dBi \\ Free space loss to Nadir & \(-138.5\) dB \\ Free space loss to edge of coverage & \(-143.3\) dB \\ Atmospheric losses & 0.1 dB \\ Fading loss & 0 dB (Rayleigh fading will be simulated in link \\  & budget calculations) \\ Satellite Rx feeder loss & 0.5 dB \\ Satellite antenna noise temperature including & 2000 K (worst case), 700 K average case \\  & 500 K \\ Polarization loss & 3 dB \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 5: ICARUS UL Link Budget. (thunderstorms, typhoons, etc. ), in dry and hot areas (e.g., Sahara Desert), and from all oceans [15]. During the first year of operation (ca. 2021 March-2022 March), we received valid payload data for 3090 individual ICARUS tags via the ISS. This represents a total of 62,791 individual valid ISS payload data (contacts to ISS). A total of 4 GB of payload data in 979 files was transferred to the ICARUS User Data Center and from there, directly into the global database, Movebank [16]. Within the database, Movebank, ICARUS hosts 2281 deployments of tags registered on individual animals. The global collaboration partners within the ICARUS initiative studied a total of 75 different animal species. In total, these deployments of tags on animals include 168,913 GPS fixes transmitted through space to the ISS. In addition, the ICARUS tags can be read out terrestrially via a handheld receiver. Here, more data can be transmitted, and thus, the total number of GPS fixes from ICARUS tags on animals in Movebank is substantially higher [17]. Scientific highlights and transformations in our knowledge about animal movements are, e.g., provided by the tracking of common cuckoos from Kamchatka to Southern Africa, the concurrent tracking of seabirds, such as Sooty terns in three oceans of the world (Atlantic Ocean: Asencion Island; Indian Ocean: Seychelles; Pacific Ocean: Polynesia) as sentinels of climate change and typhoon initiation, the first return migration tracks of European blackbirds, the tracking of African fruit bats to understand their role as ecosystem service agents and their sentinel function to find where the true host of the Ebola virus hides, or the year-round study of endangered mountain plovers in the Rocky Mountains of the USA [15; 18]. The excellent technical performance of the ICARUS tracking and communication system has started to allow us to address scientific questions in biology and ecology that were completely out of reach even 1.5 decades ago [18; 19; 20]. Conceptualization, M.K., A.K. and M.W. ; methodology, M.K. ; software, A.K. and M.K. ; validation, M.W., A.K. and S.B. ; formal analysis, M.W. and D.P. ; investigation, M.W. ; resources, M.W. ; data curation, M.W.