Communications

UM5-RIBAT

Technology demonstration / IoT & AIS/ADS-B tracking · Mohammed V University (Rabat)

UM5-RIBAT made history simply by existing: alongside its sibling UM5-EOSAT, it's one of the first two satellites ever built by a university team in Africa, developed at Mohammed V University's Center for Research in Space Technologies in Rabat and launched August 16, 2024 on SpaceX's Transporter-11 mission. Weighing under 4 kilograms and measuring roughly the size of a shoebox, Ribat carries a software-defined radio rather than a camera, giving it a communications-and-tracking mission: monitoring aircraft via ADS-B, tracking ships via AIS, and collecting data from ground-based IoT terminals across Morocco. The satellite's electronics are reprogrammable in orbit, meaning its function can be updated after launch as Moroccan engineers learn from operating it. The project—a partnership between the university, Morocco's National Center for Scientific and Technical Research, and the Royal Center for Space Studies and Research—was explicitly framed as training infrastructure: less about the specific data Ribat collects and more about building a homegrown generation of Moroccan space engineers who no longer need to go abroad to learn how satellites work.