Satellitle technology will help authorities to reduce time it takes to collect evidence of illegal fishing and other infractions in its territorial waters by deploying high-cost aircraft only after Canada’s Radarsat 2 satellite has given an initial alert. Col. Francois Malo of Canada’s Department of National Defence said that the Canadian authorities plan to extend their operational maritime surveillance capabilities with the next-generation Radarsat system, called Radarsat Constellation, by adding an Automated Identification System (AIS) terminal to each Radarsat Constellation satellite.
Funds top build several AIS-equipped small satellites has been allocated as there was a success of AIS technology in a satellite Com Dev launched in April 2008. Malo opined that using Canada’s CP 140 maritime patrol aircraft to survey Canada’s coastline — 243,770 kilometers long, with 250 ports and a traffic volume of 1,700 ships per day — takes up to 180 hours of flight time to collect the necessary evidence.
In a test program called Operation Drift Net, Canadian authorities took 80 Radarsat 2 scenes to scan the broad coastal area. High-resolution Radarsat 2 imagery was used once a suspicious vessel was spotted to determine whether it was worth an overhead pass by the aircraft. As a result the aircraft confirmed the activity just six hours after takeoff. Malo also told that deterring illegal fishing would take a huge amount of aircraft time.
According to Malo the Radarsat Constellation program, expected to feature between three and six spacecraft, “will have an AIS capability. The main objective is to have four looks at a given area per day of any area in our zone of interest, with eight minutes of SAR [synthetic aperture radar instrument] per orbit.
