A collaboration between providers of satellite-based ship tracking and radio frequency surveillance will help improve security and safety at sea
Satellite operators Spire Global and Kleosor Co subsidiary Kleos Space are collaborating to enlighten national agencies to dark maritime operations for the first time. They will combine mandatory ship tracking technology with radio frequency surveillance to improve safety at sea and maritime security intelligence.
This will amalgamate data from Spire’s satellites that track ships’ automatic identification system (AIS) with Kleos’ space-powered radio frequency (RF) reconnaissance data to create a new shared capability for maritime surveillance.
This will support and augment tools for governments, maritime agencies and organisations with strategic interest in detecting vessels, even when ships switch off their AIS.
This Safety at Sea collaboration is the first time an AIS provider and RF satellite operator have integrated their datasets.
Kleos chief executive Andy Bowyer expects this partnership will make the world’s oceans safer. “The collaboration will provide unprecedented detection of dark vessels,” he said.
This agreement goes further than integrating datasets, as it opens access to both company’s customers, in defence and commercial maritime, to AIS and RF information.
Ship captains switch off AIS if they want their vessels to be undetected by land-based and satellite-based AIS services.
By filtering Spires’ AIS-based visualisation of legitimate maritime activity using the Kleos RF activity data, organisations will gain a better view criminal maritime activity.
This provides defence and security services with daily geolocation intelligence.
It uses data from the Kleos Scouting Mission satellites, which are a part of a near-real-time global observation demonstration project.
These satellites will be the keystone for a later global high capacity constellation.
Spire’s satellites provide AIS information for a cloud-based analytics service.
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