This arti­cle first appeared in Aviation Week & Space Technology.

The U.S. is explor­ing the use of com­mer­cial satel­lites to enhance ship iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion for the bat­tle against piracy.

Long before the U.S.-flagged con­tainer ship Maersk Alabama was attacked by Somali pirates this month, a sis­ter ves­sel, the Maersk Iowa, was ply­ing the sea lanes between the U.S. East Coast and the Indian Ocean, test­ing a device that com­bines the infor­ma­tion obtained from ship­board radar and iden­ti­fi­ca­tion transpon­ders to give author­i­ties a bet­ter overview of who is on the water and what they are up to.

Now, the U.S. Office of Global Maritime Situational Awareness wants to lever­age that data fusion tech­nol­ogy to cre­ate a spaced-​​based col­lab­o­ra­tion for International Global Maritime Awareness. Guy Thomas, the office’s sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy adviser, envi­sions a net­worked infor­ma­tion sys­tem using com­mer­cial satel­lites to trans­mit a com­mon oper­at­ing pic­ture to author­i­ties, allow­ing them to mon­i­tor large ocean areas.

Thomas, a for­mer Navy sig­nals intel­li­gence offi­cer work­ing for the inter­a­gency mar­itime sit­u­a­tional aware­ness office, thinks nav­i­ga­tional radar and other sen­sor data from thou­sands of mer­chant ships — enhanced by com­mer­cial satel­lites rapidly relay­ing the infor­ma­tion to author­i­ties — could help over­come the chal­lenge of mon­i­tor­ing the vast mar­itime domain.

Using exist­ing com­mer­cial satel­lite tech­nol­ogy, such as syn­thetic aper­ture radar (SAR) and electro-​​optical and infrared imag­ing, could pro­vide all-​​weather night-​​and-​​day sur­veil­lance, even in heavy cloud cover. The satel­lites and ship­board sen­sors would com­ple­ment each other, either call­ing atten­tion to anom­alies or check­ing and ver­i­fy­ing them. The time it takes to down­load infor­ma­tion from a satel­lite could be as lit­tle as 5 min., says Thomas. The infor­ma­tion would be made avail­able to author­i­ties in an unclas­si­fied for­mat. L-​​band radar, less detailed but also less expen­sive, would be ade­quate to detect the wake of ships at sea from space, he asserts.

Probably the great­est obsta­cle fac­ing the war­ships from more than a dozen nations patrolling the pirate-​​infested waters between the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea is that the area “is just vast, more than a mil­lion square miles,” says Gordan Van Hook, the direc­tor of inno­va­tion and con­cept devel­op­ment for the U.S.-based Maersk Line Ltd. According to U.S. Central Command, 33,000 ships passed through the Gulf of Aden in 2008. The same year, 122 piracy events occurred, with 42 suc­cess­ful and 80 unsuc­cess­ful.

International mar­itime reg­u­la­tions require com­mer­cial ships weigh­ing more than 300 tons to carry an Automated Information System. Initially intended as an anti-​​collision device, the AIS is sim­i­lar to the transpon­ders that FAA reg­u­la­tions require on civil air­craft. Broadcasting on VHF radio, it divulges a ship’s iden­ti­fi­ca­tion num­ber, nav­i­ga­tion sta­tus, speed and course head­ing every 2–10 sec. Name, cargo, size, des­ti­na­tion and esti­mated time of arrival are broad­cast about every 6 min. Other ves­sels with AIS in range con­stantly receive those data. However, each ves­sel is its own infor­ma­tion bub­ble, says Van Hook, and can­not share data about other ships it encoun­ters with author­i­ties when more than 50 mi. from shore.

In a test project funded by the Transportation Dept., Lockheed Martin put a pro­to­type data fusion sys­tem, known as Neptune, on Maersk cargo ves­sels, start­ing with the Maersk Iowa in 2006. Neptune took the infor­ma­tion obtained by the ship’s radar, which has a radius of about 20 mi., and com­bined it with data from pass­ing ships received through its AIS. The infor­ma­tion was sent via an Inmarsat satel­lite to a Lockheed Martin fusion cen­ter in Eagan, Minn., says Van Hook.

Read the rest of this story, give your guess on how many tac­ti­cal vehi­cles are needed, pon­der the pos­si­bil­i­ties of the split tanker buy and see where Paris is look­ing to gas up from our friends at Aviation Week, exclu­sively on Military​.com.

– Christian