Eyes in space refocused to monitor PH land, waters
MANILA, Philippines — With its eyes in outer space refocused, the government is now better equipped to monitor the country’s land and waters, officials said on Wednesday.
The Department of Science and Technology (DOST) and the National Security Council (NSC) signed a memorandum of agreement on Wednesday to implement the Synthetic Aperture Radar and Automatic Identification System for the Innovative Terrestrial Monitoring and Maritime Surveillance (SAR With AIS) project.
The project, which is under the DOST-Advanced Science and Technology Institute (Asti) and led by Alvin Retamar, aims to improve the country’s terrestrial and maritime monitoring capabilities through the NovaSAR-1 satellite.
National Security Adviser Hermogenes Esperon Jr. said the project would help improve the country’s “capacity of maritime awareness and even enhance our position in the West Philippine Sea.” Previously, the country was monitoring mostly through air and sea “sovereignty patrols,” he said.
It was “very difficult” for the military and the coast guard to cover more than 2.2 million square kilometers of the country’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) in the country’s eastern and western seaboards, he said.
Ship information
NovaSAR-1 is a small SAR satellite launched into a 580-km sun-synchronous orbit in September 2018.
It is able to acquire earth observation data through cloud cover day and night, and detect structures on water such as ships. Its AIS receiver allows the satellite to collect ship information across the Philippine EEZ.
The NovaSAR-1 was designed and built by the United Kingdom-based company Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. (SSTL), while the SAR was courtesy of Airbus UK. The AIS receiver was from Honeywell Aerospace, a manufacturer of aircraft engines and avionics in the United States.
In August 2019, the DOST-Asti signed an agreement with SSTL for the country’s share of data tasking and acquisition of NovaSAR-1’s services. The 11-million pound (around P730 million) contract allows the government to use SSTL’s satellite throughout its lifetime.
Among the agencies that now use the data from SAR with AIS project are the NSC, National Coast Watch System, Philippine Coast Guard, Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources, and the Laguna Lake Development Authority.
Partner agencies can access data from the NovaSAR-1 satellite through DOST-Asti’s Surveillance, Identification, and Assessment using Satellites (Siyasat) portal.
Through Siyasat, users can view and download radar images and AIS data.
According to DOST-Asti’s Retamar, the data captured by SAR with AIS could be presented in graphs, charts and maps to make them easier to understand and interpret.
For instance, a click on any of the ships on a map on a computer screen can reveal information, including the vessel’s name and call sign, MMSI (Maritime Mobile Service Identity) and IMO (International Maritime Organization) numbers, and the ship’s country code.
The Siyasat portal can also generate a “heat map” to indicate where there is a concentration of vessels in the country’s EEZ.
According to Esperon, these data will help the government find swarms of Chinese ships in the West Philippine Sea.
The datasets from the NovaSAR-1 are received through the Philippine Earth Data Resource and Observation (Pedro) Center, while the secure storage and archiving of the data is coursed through the Computing and Archiving Research Environment, both located at the DOST-Asti compound at the University of the Philippines.
The data processing and analysis are spearheaded by researchers from the Pedro Center and the Remote Sensing and Data Science Help Desk using the high-performance computing resources also at DOST-Asti.
The Davao Ground Receiving Station, the largest satellite tracking facility in the country, directly receives data from NovaSAR-1 for faster availability of information useful in responding to critical events such as disasters.
