Wide-area spaceborne maritime surveillance system

Wide Area Aerial Surveillance (WAAS) systems are gaining popularity nowadays. The main function of WAAS systems is to obtain high resolution images of a large area and create knowledge to facilitate situational awareness. To accomplish that, these systems circling over city-size regions, typically at an altitude of 10.000 feet or higher, obtain images at GSDs of 20–50 cm at around 1–2 fps. Instead of transferring huge amount of raw data, it is processed onboard and extracted data is transferred. In this paper, the possibility of applying the same approach to space for the purpose of maritime surveillance is investigated. The ultimate purpose of Wide-Area Spaceborne Maritime Surveillance System (WASMAS) is to create a near real time map of ship movements all over the world. Following a requirement analysis and basic properties of the optical payload, concept of operations are introduced. An orbital analysis of the constellation is given and possibility of on-board real-time image analysis is discussed. Preliminary results are promising and shows that the system can be realized in large cubesat platforms. However, further research is required.