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How Small Satellites Will Help Police Earth's Vast

Oceans
SpaceX's December launch kickstarted a new era of global surveillance.

// BY DAVID HAMBLING FEB 4, 2019

ICEYE

The oceans are just too big to police—and if you want just one example, consider shing.

Illegal, unreported, and unregulated shing nets up to 26 million tons of sh each year, which adds
up to almost a quarter of the prots of legal shing. Powered by a shadow eet, this multi-billion-
dollar criminal enterprise hurts legit shermen and wreaks environmental havoc through overshing.

The vastness of earth's open waters allow such a black market to thrive. But in a world increasingly
surveilled by satellites in low-Earth orbit, technology is making a once impossible mission a little less
impossible.

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In the Beginning

This image is a combination of two passes from NOAA’s VIIRS instrument.

HANDOUT / GETTY IMAGES

On December 3, 2018, at Vandenberg Air Force Base, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket broke records by
placing 64 small satellites into orbit with just one mission. And among this new space otilla were
small satellites representing the vanguard for a new generation of global surveillance.

Hungry for more data, Global Fishing Watch, a collaboration among conservation group Oceana,
technology giant Google, and environmental nonprot SkyTruth, is eager to use those new satellites
to see “all the ships, all the time," creating an indispensable tool for catching illegal activity on the
high seas.

“It is now within the foreseeable future that you can expect to be able to track every vessel on the
surface of the earth,” says Tony Long, Global Fishing Watch’s CEO.

In 2016 Global Fishing Watch started with data from the radio beacons all ships carry to avoid
collisions, mapping their movements to spot shing in illegal areas. However, ship captains can
counter such surveillance by simply turning the beacons off—a potentially dangerous measure that
removes them from the map.
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In order to circumvent this shady behavior, Global Fishing Watch started supplementing beacon
locations with data from earth-observation satellites. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration’s Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) maps cloud cover. But with some
smart processing, Global Fisher Watch used their data to locate small, bright patches at night, such as
oodlights used for squid shing.

But satellite imagery is only useful on clear days, and while the NOAA imagery is free, the price for
commercial data far exceeded Global Fishery Watch’s budget.

They needed new tools if they ever hoped to keep a watchful eye on the world's oceans.

All-Seeing Radar Eyes

The European Space Agency launched Sentinel-1A, the rst of four satellites, on a mission to map
sea-ice cover, assist forest management, and tackle other large-scale tasks. But by using new
algorithms, Global Fishing Watch could pick up reections from the metal hulls of individual ships in
the earth's oceans.
“Radar is good,” says Paul Woods, chief technology officer at Global Fishing Watch. “It goes through
the clouds, it works at night, and it sees all the vessels, whether broadcasting or not.”

But radar satellites are rare and expensive. Sentinel-1, launched in 2014, is the size of an SUV and
weighs two tons, and radar imagery demand far outpaces supply.

“What was missing was a radar sensor that could go in a small satellite,” says Pekka Laurila, co-
founder of Finnish startup ICEYE. “And that was the technology we developed.”

The ICEYE-X1 satellite

ICEYE

ICEYE's original aim, much like that of Sentinel-1, was observing ice cover and monitoring dangerous
icebergs but similarly its radar could be tweaked for spotting ships as well. In early 2018, the
company launched its prototype ICEYE-X1 to prove the technology and ICEYE-X2, their rst
commercial satellite, was put into orbit in early December.

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Weighing much less than Sentinel-1 at about 150 pounds, ICEYE-X2 sends back high-quality images
with a resolution of ten feet, meaning it can distinguish a vast majority of shing vessels.

ICEYE achieved these size and cost reductions by combining new off-the-shelf electronics with an
intelligent use of trade-offs. Rather than running the power-hungry radar continuously and imaging
as much as possible, ICEYE only takes selective snapshots of areas of interest, making it far more
efficient.

ICEYE plans to launch 18 satellites with the rst ve reaching orbit by the end of 2019. By working
in teams, this new radar-equipped constellation will do something no single satellite could ever do—
revisit the same spot several times a day.
“If you can only see where an iceberg is every two days, you have to rely on current predictions,”
says Laurila. “Or you have to operate an aircraft to watch it, and that’s expensive.”

Sea ice spotted between Helsinki and Tallinn via the ICEYE-X1 satellite.
ICEYE

A whole constellation of satellites means that ICEYE can track bergs, or vessels, in near real time. Not
only can you spot an illegal shing boat, you can track it and identify it when it turns on its radio
beacon.

ICEYE is working on a variety of improvements to resolution, coverage, and communications, as well

as a novel radar sensor that can detect the material of an object as well.

“This will leap forward a generation,” says Laurila. “To compare it with television cameras, this will
be like a color camera instead of black and white. “

Origami Satellites and Radio Snoopers

 An illustration of the Capella-1.
CAPELLA SPACE

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But the same Falcon 9 rocket that launched ICEYE-X2 also launched a competitor, a micro radar
satellite from San Francisco–based Capella Space. Called the Capella-1, this satellite weighs in at just
under 100 pounds and is about the size of a backpack.

Much like the ICEYE constellation, the Capella satellites deliver what Capella's founder and CEO
Payam Banazadeh calls "rapid and persistent imagery" using constellations of satellites to revisit the
same spot several times a day. Capella Space aims to have twelve satellites in orbit by 2020.

“PREVIOUSLY THIS SORT OF DATA HAS ONLY BEEN AVAILABLE TO INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES.”
“Our cost will be an order of magnitude and in some cases two orders of magnitude cheaper than the
status quo,” says Banazadeh. “This would allow us to provide better than three-hour temporal
capability globally and position us as the most rapid high temporal provider of geospatial
information.”

Banazadeh told Popular Mechanics that their satellites benet from smart power management and
innovative design that packs the folding antenna and solar cells origami-fashion into a compact
payload, with the ultimate goal of reducing costs by any means necessary.
Going forward, Capella is likely to have even more satellites that are increasingly smaller and
cheaper while fusing the radar images with data from other sources, such as satellite photography.

But the ICEYE-X2 and Capella-1 weren't the only imaging satellites onboard this particular Falcon 9.
A very different type of space sentinel, a trio of miniature Hawk satellites from Herndon, Virginia
startup Hawkeye 360, doesn't use radar at all but instead passively scans for radio emissions
including radar, ship-to-ship, and satellite communications. Working together, the three satellites can
triangulate and pinpoint the source of signals. Pretty much any ship carrying out shing operations
will be visible and identiable from its particular combination of equipment.

An illustration of the Hawk satellite constellation in action.

“Previously this sort of data has only been available to intelligence agencies,” says Woods. “You’ll be
able to get a digital ngerprint for each individual ship.”

Hawkeye 360 is currently carrying out mission checks and maneuvering its satellites into position
before operations. While Global Fishing Watch may not have access to Hawkeye’s service
immediately, its success could create a gold rush of small satellites built for tracking ships via radio.

Putting It All Together

 The ICEYE-X1 launch via ISRO
ICEYE

But in order for this new collection of satellites to be useful, Global Fishing Watch will need to merge
disparate streams of data into a single view.

“Once you can start layering radar with other data, like photographic and AIS [radio beacon], you
start to get a really nice picture,” says Woods. "What was unimaginable just a few years ago is now
becoming inevitable."

RELATED STORY

How Tiny Satellites Will Reveal a Big Universe

This new generation of low-cost observation satellites could also transform agriculture,
infrastructure, defense, intelligence, and scientic communities, but for maritime policing, it's a
whole new era. With nowhere to hide from satellite-based policing, smugglers, traffickers, and
pirates will no longer be safe within the boundless blue of the ocean.

The Wild West of illegal shing will have to deal with a new sheriff in town.

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