Small Sat Mission for Maritime Surveillance, based on SAR, VDES/AIS and COMINT/ELINT Integrated Solutions

The recent growth of Security services needs in the Maritime Operations market is providing a major pull demand of Integrated Solutions for Maritime Surveillance able to provide several different applications and added value services for: · Maritime accidents investigations; · Piracy and armed robbery at sea; · Terrorist threats in maritime environment; · Maritime Safety (including Search and Rescue), · Maritime Security and prevention of pollution caused by ships; · Fisheries control; · Marine environment monitoring and disaster prevention; · Sea Border Control; · Maritime Defence operations. To respond accordingly to the above strong needs, new coming Integrated Solutions for Maritime Security & Safety shall be based on Small and Micro Satellite Constellation Systems with flexible and modular Spacecraft configurations able to host new high performing space communication and sensor payload technologies and suitable mission performances in terms of responsiveness (revisit time), resilience and processing distributed in the space. Small and Micro-satellite platforms result to be very effective and useful to respond to the abovementioned requirements when designed and optimised to host relevant mission payload (P/L) technologies such as: SAR, VDES/AIS, COMmunication INTelligence (COMINT)/ ELectronic INTelligence (ELINT). A small Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) payload represents a key space sensor capability to provide the acquisition of high resolution satellite imagery in a given Area of Interest (AoI) in maritime environment for ship and oil-spill detection and for elaborating on ground further products of Data Elevation Model (DEM), displacement monitoring and change detection. The VDES/AIS payload in VHF band facilitate the AIS identification, position reporting and tracking as well as an interoperable digital data exchange between ships, between ships and shore, between shore and ships and between ship and satellite. VDES in ITU roadmap is intended to be a globally available digital data exchange system dedicated to maritime safety, security and the protection of the maritime environment. The COMINT/ELINT payload will cope with the major needs to frequently acquire signals with relevant sensitivity over a given AoI and this can be obtained with a satellite constellation flying over the specific AoI. A COMINT/ELINT payload would consist of receiving antennas able to acquire the electromagnetic and communication signals in specific bands, pre-processed with an on-board digital processing unit (or received & forwarded to ground in pass-through mode) and thereafter transmitted on ground for further analyses, data fusion and investigations. Finally, this paper will provide an overview of integrated solutions with a Federated Fragmented Satellite System (FFSS) architecture based on small satellite constellations exploiting, in a distributed way, different payload capabilities with SAR, VDES/AIS and COMINT/ELINT technologies providing to a Maritime Surveillance ground segment the data coming from the different sources elaborated to create added-value information in order to collect as much as possible a complete Maritime Operational Picture.