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ISS Can Now Watch Sea Traffic From Space
gyrogeerloose writes "During its last mission, astronauts from the Space Shuttle Atlantis installed an Automatic Identification System antenna on the outside of the International Space Station that will allow astronauts aboard the ISS to monitor signals from the AIS transmitters mandated to be installed on most large ocean-going craft. Although these VHF signals can be monitored from the Earth's surface, their horizontal range is generally limited to about 75 km (46 mi), leaving large areas of the ocean unwatched. However, the signals easily reach the 400 km (250 mi) orbit of the ISS. The European Space Agency sees this experiment as a test platform for a future AIS-monitoring fleet of satellites that will eventually provide worldwide coverage of sea traffic."
How long before I get pulled over for speeding in the trade lanes?
Yes, because pirates always follow regulation and install a AIS transmitters in their "large ocean-going craft"
There are several websites that show at least coastal traffic of all AIS equipped vessels. I like http://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/
He is gonna be HUGE.
Here's the map of existing coverage. The continental US, Europe, and Japan, have full coastal coverage. The port coasts of China and Australia are covered. Beyond that, not so much.
This isn't a safety system. It's for traffic and port management. Vessels show up in the system around the time when ports need to start thinking about where to put them.
This is a pretty common and extremely cheap sensor to put in space. Multiple tiny satellites have demonstrated the utility of an AIS sensor in space.
In space these are mainly used to track ships who might be up to no good on open water. Also you can fuse the data with radar satellite wake detection, any detected ship with their signal turned off also might be up to no good. Canada is doing just this with M3MSat and Radarsat-2
This completely screws up my plans to grow cannabis on my yacht...
Anyone knows what are the advantages of using ISS for this kind of test? I would be interested to see what it costs to send such an antenna up with the shuttle, test that it does not interfere with the rest of the station and train an astronaut to fix it to the exterior, versus just slapping it as secondary payload on some other satellite or even some dedicated micro-satellite that is piggybacking on the launch of a bigger one.
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
They're already watching sea traffic from space. What this does is allow them to quickly remove "legitimate" traffic from the database so they can focus on traffic that's antithetical to the Empire.
"Is this Winkhorst a nova criminal?" "No just a technical sergeant wanted for interrogation."
When your kids, in their rubber big sea going rubber toy rafts, see pirates / pedophiles, they can press the dolphin button, and get directly connected to an officer with the coast guard.
Yes, because pirates always follow regulation and install a AIS transmitters in their "large ocean-going craft"
For all of the same reasons that criminals who are willing to commit murder will always follow gun-control laws. Oh, wait...
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
You're absolutely correct that the mujahedeen (or however you spell that) in Afghanistan were bankrolled and given weapons by the CIA, and bin Laden's contacts within that organization became al Qaeda, and so the West definitely deserves some blame for that. However, there's no particular reason to believe that the CIA had any ongoing interest in any of them once the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan. There's certainly no evidence and no reason to believe that they actually helped plan or carry out 9/11.
The major problem with the idea that the US government had anything to do with 9/11 is that there's no credible evidence of it and there's no reason to believe their assistance would have been required to carry it out. At the heart of it, the 9/11 attack was supremely unsophisticated. All the hijackers needed was some box cutters and plane tickets, and training to fly a plane. All of these things are widely available, and anybody could have done it. The fact is, it's quite easy to believe some dude in a cave could have planned and carried it out, especially when that dude in a cave happens to be as wealthy as Osama bin Laden, heir to the bin Laden construction fortune.
I know none of that is convincing to conspiracy buffs, but the fact is a perfectly simple and plausible explanation for the event exists that requires no massive conspiracies: a highly motivated group of people did something that anyone could have done with a little time and a few thousand dollars.
The ISS operates at a relatively low orbit, even for LEO... for example the Iridium constellation is about twice the ISS' altitude (760km vs 350km). They'd have to find a mission that's within the 400km range of the system, and that has room and power to spare.
Well, it depends on how you do your accounting...
Obviously, it's more expensive to put a space station in orbit in order to test a transmitter. The idea behind ISS, though, is that we pay for it to be up there so that we can put experiments into orbit without building all of the necessary hardware for a satellite. It makes it cheaper for groups wishing to do experiments in orbit because the rest of us subsidize the orbital hardware (ie, the ISS). Because we must supply the ISS, we also subsidize getting the experiments up to the ISS (eg, We need to ship 1000 pounds of food, our rocket will carry 1500 pounds, so we've got 500 pounds that we can fill up with experiments). Because we have to bring things back from ISS (people mostly), we'll carry experiments back to Earth.
So when you include all those in your calculations, the ISS is much more expensive than launching a satellite. However, if you were doing the experiment, it's much cheaper to have the ISS (because governments have already spent the money on the platform and getting stuff up there and back). This, in theory, encourages researchers to consider these experiments because it's cheaper for them.