The research project, in collaboration with the New Zealand Defence Technology Agency and DMC International Imaging, identified 54 satellites currently only taking images of land, which could take photos of the oceans and inland waters.
Dr Nigel Bannister from the university’s department of Physics and Astronomy believes regularly updated images of the seas from these satellites could reduce search areas for missing ships to just a few hundred square miles.
A system able to do that would potentially cut search and rescue times for vessels and significantly improve crews’ chances of survival.
“This isn’t a surveillance system that monitors vessel movements across the oceans in real time, like radar tracking of aircraft in the sky; instead we have proposed a system which records images every time a satellite passes over specific points of the sea,” he said.
“If we are alerted to a lost vessel, the images allow us to pinpoint its last observed position.”
David Neyland, former assistant director of the US Navy Office of Naval Research-Global, who funded the research, says the university was able to build an open source model of an international virtual constellation of spacecraft from 19 nations giving “a transparent view of space operations never done before”.
The team is now further testing the concept by working on the automated detection of vessels within imagery provided from the NigeriaSat 2 and UK-DMC2 satellites from DMC International Imaging. I it aims to develop a practical system within a few years in cooperation with the New Zealand Defence Technology Agency.
