The U.S. Navy has partnered with a startup micro-satellite operator on a project to track ship movements from space – using their radio-frequency emissions.
Commercial ship-tracking services rely upon satellite collection of AIS transciever signals, which can be received from space (with some limitations). However, AIS is easily manipulated: the equipment aboard the ship can be tampered with to display a false location, name, MMSI, flag registry and other identifiers. The techniques used for AIS spoofing and falsification grow more sophisticated all the time. More commonly, a vessel can simply “go dark” by turning off its AIS transciever in order to reduce (but not eliminate) the odds of being tracked.
Military services commonly use radio-frequency surveillance to track and identify targets of interest, and the Navy is applying this age-old technique to the problem of ship-tracking. With the help of D.C.-based startup Kleos Space, Naval Surface Warfare Center Division Crane is studying ways to use RF geolocation datato improve maritime domain awareness for national security missions. This could include sanctions enforcement, transshipment monitoring, SAR, fisheries management and border control, among other tasks.
“Kleos’ data improves the ability to detect and monitor suspect vessels across wider areas and over longer detection intervals. Our RF data greatly expands the search range, access, and volume to reach the vast maritime domain,” said Kleos chief revenue officer Eric von Eckartsberg in a statement.
The partnership is part of the Office of Naval Research’s SCOUT campaign, a series of collaborative /government experiments centered on the needs of Joint Inter-Agency Task Force-South, the international counternarcotics campaign in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific.
Kleos’ satellites offer the Navy something more than the contents of RF signals from shipping. Its constellation orbits the globe in “clusters” of four satellites. This means that each cluster of four can triangulate the position of a received signal, yielding accurate RF geolocation data. If a rogue tanker disables its AIS system – as rogue tankers usually do – it could still be locatable by other shipboard RF emissions, received from above.
