ISS used to spy on worlds sea traffic!

Ok a bit over the top on the 'spy' title admittedly but the ESA has an article up today stating:

"ESA’s Columbus module is testing the viability of monitoring global traffic from the Station’s orbit hundreds of kilometres up"

So far only cargo ships above certain weights and passenger carriers of all sizes can be monitored due to them having a class 'A' AIS transponder (Automatic Identification System) these broadcast continually updated identification and navigation data so a small ship without the AIS transponder wouldn't be able to be tracked, even so the amount of ships able to be tracked is quite high:

"The COLAIS (Columbus AIS) experiment was switched on at the start of June, To give an idea, more than 90 000 Class A AIS messages were gathered between 19:00 GMT on 2 June and 09:00 GMT the following day, giving a global overview of maritime traffic." so that's a fair amount of data they can monitor and this along with the speed of the ISS it would seem is a problem for them:

"The main challenge is simply that far too many vessels are detected at once, leading to signal overlaps and interference. The Station’s 7 km/s speed also distorts the signal. The receivers therefore need to be capable of high-performance signal detection and message decoding"

Not Earth shattering news I know but it made me ponder just what else they have up there on the ISS, obviously it's an international effort so all TPTB involved will be in the know, but that doesn't stop me thinking maybe there is far more technology up there than being admitted to…

Check the article it's quite interesting..


ESA

errrrr.. yea.. we knew this .. and Star for keeping the sheepol educated..

reply to post by Komodo


The less sheepol out there the better I say

Like I said not Earth shattering news, but you gotta think outside the box once in a while and wonder just what else they have up there to play with, it seems to be the general consensus that technology is far more advanced than the public are made aware of, so maybe they have UFO killing lasers too… j/k

Back in the day, the USSR maintained a number of spy satellites that used radar to track naval vessels. They were powered by nuclear reactors. Most of them successfully ejected their reactor cores into higher stable orbits when they were retired, but a few weren't successful. One, kosmos 1818, recently was damaged and sprayed a bunch of radioactive coolant into space.

en.wikipedia.org...

so, yeah, the USSR could have been tracking all naval activity since the late 60s. I'm sure any network of regular spy satellites could be used to track ships of any size, but that would require having actual photo surveillance experts examine the photos. Not that this is any problem for a country that can afford a network of spy satellites.

This ISS thing is probably meant to provide an automatic map of all the world's shipping, to be like the equivalent of an air traffic control map, only for the oceans. I don't really have a problem with that. For being a place with no government or ownership, international waters isn't exactly the land of the free. Maritime law is pretty harsh.