Bremen, September 23, 2009. This morning at 8:21 a.m. CET the Indian rocket PSLV-C14 took off from Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, India, and successfully launched the 960-kg satellite Oceansat-2 and six nanosatellites into orbit.

The two satellites RUBIN-9.1 and RUBIN-9.2, weighing in at 8kg each, were also on board, with the primary aim of carrying out additional tests of the Automatic Identification System (AIS) for ships.

RUBIN-9.1 was developed by LUXSPACE Sàrl, Luxembourg, a subsidiary of OHB Technology, for the purpose of testing the first generation of AIS receivers for the Automatic Identification System (AIS). These receivers collect data broadcast automatically from ships around the world regarding their position, course and cargo and transmit the information back to Earth for analysis.

One of the main tasks of RUBIN-9.2, which was developed by OHB-System in cooperation with the University of Applied Sciences Bremen, is to continue the AIS experiments already initiated by RUBIN 7 and RUBIN 8 and thus create a larger database that can be used for validation purposes. RUBIN 9.2 is identical in construction to RUBIN-8, which was already launched in April 2008 via the PSLV-C9 launch vehicle.