with Canadian authorities to maintain border
security and will seek further opportunities to
partner with Canadian authorities to exploit
the vehicle’s capabilities,” says evans.
trAnspArency At seA A Must HAve
Under national Security presidential directive
41/Homeland Security presidential directive
13, a national Strategy for maritime Security
must be developed. the departments of
defense and Homeland Security are responsible for making this a reality, and the national
plan to achieve maritime domain awareness
is one of eight plans developed in support of
this national strategy.
“the sea is large, and ships are small,”
says dana Goward, director of mda program
integration at U.S. Coast Guard headquarters.
“With the aid of satellite technology, we are
able to expand our knowledge of the deep
ocean significantly, not just coastal zones.
maritime security lies now in transparency, not
in the secrecy of the past.”
Goward’s office works with the U.S. naval
research laboratory on programs such as the
tacSat- 2 satellite, which was placed into orbit
in december. the spacecraft was used in a test
involving the first signal reception in space of
the automatic identification System (aiS). the
system, originally designed for collision avoidance, has evolved into a ship tracking solution.
While the test provided a good start, more
work will be required before spacecraft-aided
aiS operations become a reality, says Guy
thomas, science & technology advisor in the
Coast Guard mda program integration office.
“We do not believe that two passes a day
by a single satellite is sufficient,” he says.
“receiving a position on a high-interest vessel
twice a day makes it hard both to maintain
track if the vessel deviates as well as to establish a routine operations profile. one or more
of those passes may be corrupted due to co-channel interference from a source that is only
on the air at a specifics time. Having more
collection opportunities might overcome this
situation, which we believe to be a very real
potential problem.
“the number of aiS transmitters in such
areas as the Straits of malacca or the english
Channel may create a dense signal environment where co-channel interference will be
much more problematic as you go higher and
see more signals,” thomas says. “more collection opportunities will allow for more opportu-
inmarsat-C satellite communications technology. For example, coastal nations will be able
to access updated ship tracking data not only
about vessels inbound to their own ports but
also data from vessels in transit through their
coastal waters up to 1,000 miles offshore.
“Satellites are key to transparency in the
deep ocean,” says Goward, adding that
the aiS will be enhanced by the scheduled
launch of an orbcomm satellite equipped
with an aiS receiver in the second quarter.
the Coast Guard mda team has had a
contract with orbcomm for several years to
“ With the aid of satellite technology,
we are able to expand our knowledge
of the deep ocean significantly, not
just coastal zones. Maritime security
lies now in transparency...”
— Goward, U.S. Coast Guard
nities in these dense environments.”
Beyond tacSat- 2, the Coast Guard mda
team has set its sights on flying another payload on tacSat- 4, scheduled to be launched
in 2008. “We have made our needs known
to them and hope they will be considered.
We suspect they will,” thomas says. the
department of defense “likes to have us
onboard because we have different authorities
for data collection.”
international contributions also are being
made to the mda programs. the international
maritime organization is establishing an international data center where all ships of a certain size will send location data automatically
four times per day via the Global maritime
distress and Safety System which employs
place an aiS receiver in low earth orbit, and
orbcomm has announced plans to include
the aiS receivers in many of its future com-
munications satellites.
in a related effort, the University of
miami’s Center for Southeastern tropical
advanced remote Sensing conducted a
demonstration in fall 2006 in which a combination of seven civilian satellites detected
and tracked vessels transiting from the
eastern mediterranean to the east Coast of
the United States. “these are the first tentative explorations of the use of commercial
space assets for mda. We are very pleased
with the results,” says Goward. “through
this form of remote detection and tracking,
we will be able to detect any anomalies
