Space-Based Global Maritime Surveillance. Part I: Satellite Technologies

Maritime situational awareness (MSA) is defined as an enabling capability which seeks to deliver the required information superiority in the maritime environment to achieve a common understanding of the maritime situation, to increase effectiveness in the planning and conduct of operations. A key component of MSA is maritime surveillance (MS), which is crucial for search and rescue operations, fishery monitoring, pollutioncontrol, law enforcement, migration monitoring, and national security policies. There is the need of supplementary sensors and technologies to overcome the aforementioned limitations, and provide MS capabilities in remote areas of the Earth. Space-based remote sensing data involves a range of technologies and modalities, including satellite AIS (Sat-AIS), synthetic aperture radar (SAR), multispectral (MSP) and hyperspectral (HSP) optical sensors, global navigation satellite system reflectometry (GNSS-R), with features such as resolutions, viewing angle, frequency, acquisition modes, polarization. Space-based sensors for earth observation (EO) installed on satellites allow collecting images of large and remote areas of the globe with relatively short latency, and hence, they are highly relevant to MS.