Deep Ocean to Deep Space

Ocean (surface) to Space (air space) February 6, 2015

I heard two stories on NPR yesterday morning that both grabbed my attention and I linked in my head. I wonder if anyone else will? One was on tracking illegal fishing. Its very difficult to do. Fish that are illegal to take in one area are not in others and once the fish is off the boat that caught it you loose track. So John Amos  who runs Sky Truth in West Virginia uses the automatic identification system (AIS) that ships to avoid collision to do just this. AIS uses VHF radio to communicate location, vessel information and other data one to another, and to satellites that then gather that information and make it available on the internet. I just took a look at our area on http://www.marinetraffic.com/. Its pretty fascinating. Radar has been the primary collision avoidance for boat for a long while but there are times it does not work so well. Over horizons, in bad weather of if you are a very low boat, like our sailboat and a large ship which is headed your way and cannot turn to avoid a close encounter. Amos uses this to plot movement of boats on the other side of the world and coordinate with officials when they think that a boat is involved in illegal fishing so they can intercept it before it leaves the area or transfers the catch to another boat. Pretty clever use of existing technology I think. See:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2015/02/05/383562379/gotcha-satellites-help-strip-seafood-pirates-of-their-booty

Then I heard another story on an U.N. agency that is holding a conferece on how we can track airliners during their flights. Our current tracking is very limited so once a plane is way out there we just have to hope it is going to come back into view again. They want to have a system where the plane transmits its position heading and other vital information every 15 minutes. Sounds like they just need to go over to West Marine and pick up some AIS enabled radios. Get them for about $300. OK I know, its not anywhere near that simple. And you would want the air traffic on a different frequency. Either that or with different encoding. But the technology has already been tested and is in use world wide.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2015/02/05/383963482/new-standards-for-tracking-aircraft-in-flight