ISS Can Now Watch Sea Traffic From Space 89
gyrogeerloose writes "During its last mission, astronauts from the Space Shuttle Atlantis installed an Automatic Identification System antenna on the outside of the International Space Station that will allow astronauts aboard the ISS to monitor signals from the AIS transmitters mandated to be installed on most large ocean-going craft. Although these VHF signals can be monitored from the Earth's surface, their horizontal range is generally limited to about 75 km (46 mi), leaving large areas of the ocean unwatched. However, the signals easily reach the 400 km (250 mi) orbit of the ISS. The European Space Agency sees this experiment as a test platform for a future AIS-monitoring fleet of satellites that will eventually provide worldwide coverage of sea traffic."
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It's a lot of things, including foreign intervention in local politics by, dare I say it, the CIA and other western intelligence agencies.
Source?
And do you really think any kind of local authority beyond that of an Israeli military state could defend their territorial waters against a Chinese ship dumping nuclear waste?
Well, the Somalia Pirates have hijaked a Chinese ship before. source [smh.com.au]
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You're an intelligent person. Look it up. What do I look like, a school marm? Learn to think for yourself, fella. You let other people think for you, they're gonna fill your head up with a lot of crap.
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Let me translate "Source?" for you, Winkhorst.
It means "I don't believe a word of your crap, back it up with evidence, or shut up".
Get it? Its a challenge.
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There's lots of evidence. You're just too lazy or too stupid to look it up.
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They don't call you guys anonymous cowards for nothing.
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I don't know much about the Somalis. I do know that Al Qaida was created and bankrolled by the CIA as a response to the Soviets in Afghanistan (and secondarily as a kind of "get even" strategy for Russian actions in Vietnam), so I really don't think "some responsibility" quite covers it.
As for terrorism, you can either believe that some guy in a mountain cave engineered an operation that totally confounded the combined military defences of the United States of America or you can believe that the handlers of
Re:Innocuous Uses (Score:4, Insightful)
The major problem with the idea that the US government had anything to do with 9/11 is that there's no credible evidence of it and there's no reason to believe their assistance would have been required to carry it out. At the heart of it, the 9/11 attack was supremely unsophisticated. All the hijackers needed was some box cutters and plane tickets, and training to fly a plane. All of these things are widely available, and anybody could have done it. The fact is, it's quite easy to believe some dude in a cave could have planned and carried it out, especially when that dude in a cave happens to be as wealthy as Osama bin Laden, heir to the bin Laden construction fortune.
I know none of that is convincing to conspiracy buffs, but the fact is a perfectly simple and plausible explanation for the event exists that requires no massive conspiracies: a highly motivated group of people did something that anyone could have done with a little time and a few thousand dollars.
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Conspiracy is comforting.
It makes the believer able to not only make sense of the world, but feel religiously exalted by their special insight which elevates them above the herd. Conspiracy is much less frightening to the simple mind than an uncertain world.
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I submit that upon thoroughly investigating the 9/11 evidence from both the official theory and multiple alternative theories...
It's been done, by numerous independent agencies, organizations, etc. They've all proved the conspiracy theories to be so much wishful thinking. If you can't figure out what a "duck" is after all the testimony, tests, and evidence presented, you will never be convinced, so neither I nor anyone could possibly present sufficient evidence or argument that would convince you differently. Frankly, the issue IS settled, only you want a few more minutes in the limelight and so refuse to accept the truth. THER
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I ask, because it looks like the top of at least one of the buildings came down in a chunk that starts right where the airplane hit. Did they screw up the timing on the thermite? Why didn't that top part stay intact and reveal the unfired thermite pots to the world?
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How do you explain the thermite residue that was found after scientific analysis of the steel beams was performed? That's not something that a fuel-air bomb based on jet fuel could produce.
I make thermite all the time, though not for burning; it's a side effect of a metal restoration process I use, with common household items (aluminum foil). A little aluminum and some iron oxide. The beams would have had some oxidization, and the airplane would have had aluminum. Thermite remains tend to be unburned (yeah, right) Al + Fe-oxides or burned Al2O3 + Fe, or Al2O3 + Fe-oxides (it does re-oxidize later). Thermite is an incredibly simple compound and the stuff it leaves behind is incredibly com
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The week before 9/11 a team of Mideast termite specialists came in to treat every floor, but really they were thermite specialists!
It was a conspiracy!
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Yes, because pirates always follow regulation and install a AIS transmitters in their "large ocean-going craft"
For all of the same reasons that criminals who are willing to commit murder will always follow gun-control laws. Oh, wait...
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Damn straight as an american where do you think i get my cuban cigars from? 20 miles from my home is a nice smoke shop in canada.
the big trick is to not be suspicious enough to draw attention of the border guard. Of course you can always travel by boat, and use a "video terminal" to check in with the border guard. It isn't like they can detain you that way. As long as you don't move large object of materials, or more than a couple of people it is a very porous border.
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IMO has made carriage of AIS mandatory in the recently revised SOLAS chapter V, for all new ships over 300 GRT, from July 1, 2002, and existing ships to follow in a tight schedule there after (see attached).
If you want to work out exactly how big a 300 GRT yacht would be, check out this Wikipedia page [wikipedia.org].
Crap (Score:5, Funny)
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Not crap!
Think of what fun it'd be using lasers to blast pirates!
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Re:Crap (Score:4, Funny)
"Speed Limit Enforced By Spacecraft."
I can't wait to see the icon on the sign. ... not to mention the defense attorneys going for the relativistic measurement argument. "Your Honor, we would like to question the prosecution's derivation of gamma."
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Space Craft [feeddistiller.com] Feed @ Feed Distiller [feeddistiller.com]
Where else... (Score:2)
Where else would they be watching sea traffic from?
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Satellite? Maybe they are trying to find a way to justify the boondoggle ISS.
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ISS Can Now Watch Sea Traffic From Space
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A reason other than 'justifying' the space station would be that it is likely a lot cheaper to run a test like this on the ISS than to launch one or more test satellites that each require their own power systems, etc.
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I'm skeptical. Perhaps quicker set-up turnaround, but not necessarily cheaper.
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Well, it depends on how you do your accounting...
Obviously, it's more expensive to put a space station in orbit in order to test a transmitter. The idea behind ISS, though, is that we pay for it to be up there so that we can put experiments into orbit without building all of the necessary hardware for a satellite. It makes it cheaper for groups wishing to do experiments in orbit because the rest of us subsidize the orbital hardware (ie, the ISS). Because we must supply the ISS, we also subsidize getting
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The cost to put a certain weight into orbit is roughly the same regardless of payload. If it's a small payload, then usually it's batched with other objects, such as other satellites because it's cheaper to manage the launch of multiple things instead of one. The overhead of life-support and human safety systems on ISS is also a cost factor that should be considered.
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Re:Where else... (Score:4, Interesting)
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"The Empire" being every shipping company and country _in the world_ of course.
Tracking coastal AIS vessels (Score:5, Informative)
There are several websites that show at least coastal traffic of all AIS equipped vessels. I like http://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/ [marinetraffic.com]
When big brother comes... (Score:4, Funny)
Coverage map (Score:5, Informative)
Here's the map of existing coverage. [marinetraffic.com] The continental US, Europe, and Japan, have full coastal coverage. The port coasts of China and Australia are covered. Beyond that, not so much.
This isn't a safety system. It's for traffic and port management. Vessels show up in the system around the time when ports need to start thinking about where to put them.
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That's just the coverage available on one particular website. (Other sites can have different data sources and different coverage.) Also, those rectangles just mean that there is some coverage within the rectangle. (Often, coverage is available around larger cities and a lot of the area is not covered.)
Furthermore, AIS is sometimes used for collision avoidance, so it is used for safety.
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AIS data is also used for things like oil spills and search and rescue. When I used to work for the Australian Maritime Safety Authority we had a couple incidents where the AIS data was used to reconstruct the events leading up to the disaster (such as the pacific adventurer [amsa.gov.au] one earlier this year). They also use it to track any vessels going near the Great Barrier Reef without having a qualified pilot on board (basically someone who knows their way around the reef) so the vessel doesn't crash into anything.
No surprise really (Score:2, Informative)
This is a pretty common and extremely cheap sensor to put in space. Multiple tiny satellites have demonstrated the utility of an AIS sensor in space.
In space these are mainly used to track ships who might be up to no good on open water. Also you can fuse the data with radar satellite wake detection, any detected ship with their signal turned off also might be up to no good. Canada is doing just this with M3MSat and Radarsat-2
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Hmmm...this is coming.. (Score:1)
I'm pissed (Score:2, Funny)
Recycling urine, sweat, and bongwater (Score:2)
Why ISS? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Only if they're also piggybacking on equipment as well. Man-rated launch vehicles are expensive. The thing that might be cheap is the bandwidth to send a file full of instructions.
The orbit? (Score:3, Interesting)
The ISS operates at a relatively low orbit, even for LEO... for example the Iridium constellation is about twice the ISS' altitude (760km vs 350km). They'd have to find a mission that's within the 400km range of the system, and that has room and power to spare.
Re:Why ISS? (Score:4, Insightful)
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It's not cheap but the development lifecycle could well be shorter than for a secondary on an unmanned spacecraft. And, since it's VHF, I guess there's an outside chance that, instead of a dedicated antenna (which wouldn't be too hard) they could have piggybacked on the new (or the remaining old) ARISS antenna.
Packets in space isn't new by a long-shot and tracking in space isn't, really, either.
Re:Get to the point. (Score:4, Funny)
Uses? (Score:1, Interesting)
So is this going to be used to find the best spot to crash ISS 2 years after it is completed, just in the unlikely chance that large parts reach the ground?
More on Space based AIS (Score:2)
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AIS on the IIS is amusing, but not all that helpful. SpaceQuest, ORBCOMM, and COM DEV all have space based AIS systems up...
Specifically, COM DEV has CanX-6 [utias-sfl.net] (also known as NTS, or Nanosatellite Tracking Ships) which has been operating on orbit for over a year now. NTS is much smaller than the ISS too, measuring in at 6.5 kg for a 20 cm x 20 cm x 20 cm cube. NTS went from bar-napkin concept to launch in just 7 months.
The UTIAS Space Flight Laboratory [utias-sfl.net] (the organization that designed and built NTS for COM DEV) is also working on a Norwegian satellite called AISSat-1 [utias-sfl.net] that is due to launch in the coming months. While the same size an
Next financial Crash (Score:2)
Cool ... use it to predict the next financial crash.
Very similar to Ham Radio APRS (one feature of it) (Score:2)
This is really cool -- Ham radio has been doing almost exactly this for years [ariss.net].
A ground station with nothing more than a 5 Watt handheld VHF transmitter and a regular 19" long antenna can send a position report and message via a number of satellites, including the International Space Station, using a protocol called APRS. As these are low-earth orbit satellites, you generally only have a few minutes window with each pass, but it's not terribly hard to do and there are a few satellites to potentially catch p
Re:Very similar to Ham Radio APRS (one feature of (Score:2)
Yeah, I've played with a GPS unit hooked up to my 2 meter mobile rig doing just that. It's cool, although in the end I decided it didn't really do enough for me to justify the hassle since it's sort of a kludge on the IC-2200H.
KJ6BSO