Deimos is currently part of a consortium developing a system under the EO-Alert project to develop on-board processing capabilities for maritime vessel detection. We are also working with an autonomous vessel company to understand requirements to tailor on-board processing for a number of autonomous vessel use cases.
The focus was to enable low-latency maritime object detection in order to assist collision avoidance measures, situational awareness and planning. From this work, there are considered to be cases where satellite-based intelligence can be enhanced with a HAPS based platform. This has so far been out of scope for current projects, however we see it is an emerging requirement due to its unique footprint and temporal persistence. We would use this call to adapt our current payload design to the case of HAPS on-board processing. We see this being of particular use in areas such as the High Arctic, where satellite coverage is degraded, or over busy port areas where persistent monitoring is required as well as over the horizon monitoring. The proliferation of HAPS platforms is starting to emerge, with organisations such as Airbus, Facebook, Thales, the Ordnance Survey and ESA designing and building a variety of platforms, with different payload characteristics. Contracting mechanisms are likely to be flexible in future providing an opportunity for new payloads. In terms of data transfer, we know that current spectrum identifications do have challenges with low bandwidth, meaning that on-board processing is a key enabler, reducing the amount of data streamed to ground, and only providing pertinent processed information to the user. In this call we would demonstrate the feasibility of using our vessel detection system on a HAPS platform, converting raw data into lightweight data downloads of critical information.
