Satellites play a critical role in domestic and international homeland security operations. To maintain secure borders, around-the-clock surveillance is required, and monitoring what flows across borders and approaches a country’s shores requires constant vigilance in good weather and bad. In the United States, teams engaged in the Secure Border Initiative (SBI) and Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) programs strive to achieve shared optimal situational awareness on land and at sea using satellite technology to ensure safety and security.

Satellite technology and fixed and mobile Ku-band VSAT terminals, in particular, make up an important part of what is known as SBInet, says Kirk Evans, SBI program manager. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The agency serves as the executive agent for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s SBInet program, collaborating with lead contractor Boeing to implement this program. “A critical component of the strategy to control U.S. borders is [the Department of Homeland Security’s] plan to launch a comprehensive program to transform border control technology and infrastructure,” he says. “The goal of SBInet is to field the most effective mix of current and next-generation technology, infrastructure, staffing and response platforms. SBInet will integrate multiple state-of-the-art systems and traditional security infrastructure into a single comprehensive border security suite for the Department.”

The commercially-based system uses VSATs to provide wideband communications links between mobile surveillance and local communications towers and mobile and fixed command and control centers,” says Evans. SBInet sensor and surveillance data will be relayed from these mobile surveillance towers back to the command and control centers via satellite as well, an end-to-end solution that will require enhanced training for CBP personnel as the SBInet systems are introduced and deployed, he says. Iridium satellite phones will provide communications to field agents in remote areas, and there are no plans to migrate satellite operations from commercial satellites onto more secure U.S. Department of Defense platforms, he says.

In addition, Ku-band satellite communications links will play an important role in the deployment of new Predator B unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). Initial deployments began in the Southwestern United States in late 2005, and at least four UAVs are scheduled to be patrolling the U.S. border with Mexico by late 2007.

CBP personnel will operate the Predators from the CBP Air and Marine Operations Center in Riverside, Calif., and the UAVs will relay sensor data via satellite back to the center where it can be studied by intelligence analysts specializing in specific regions of the United States, says Evans. “Once the data is analyzed, it will be disseminated in near-real time to the appropriate Border Patrol Sector for response,” he says.

The Predator can stay aloft for up to 30 hours, and CBP is coordinating its actions with other U.S. government organizations to determine the best use of the UAVs. Operations also are getting underway along the U.S.-Canadian border with Predators operating out of Grand Forks, N.D. The CBP works closely with Canadian authorities to maintain border security and will seek further opportunities to partner with Canadian authorities to exploit the vehicle’s capabilities,” says Evans.

Transparency At Sea A Must Have

Under National Security Presidential Directive 41/Homeland Security Presidential Directive 13, a National Strategy for Maritime Security must be developed. The Departments of Defense and Homeland Security are responsible for making this a reality, and the National Plan to Achieve Maritime Domain Awareness is one of eight plans developed in support of this national strategy.
“The sea is large, and ships are small,” says Dana Goward, director of MDA program integration at U.S. Coast Guard headquarters. “With the aid of satellite technology, we are able to expand our knowledge of the deep ocean significantly, not just coastal zones. Maritime security lies now in transparency, not in the secrecy of the past.”

Goward’s office works with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory on programs such as the TacSat-2 satellite, which was placed into orbit in December. The spacecraft was used in a test involving the first signal reception in space of the Automatic Identification System (AIS). The system, originally designed for collision avoidance, has evolved into a ship tracking solution.

While the test provided a good start, more work will be required before spacecraft-aided AIS operations become a reality, says Guy Thomas, science & technology advisor in the Coast Guard MDA Program Integration Office. “We do not believe that two passes a day by a single satellite is sufficient,” he says. “Receiving a position on a high-interest vessel twice a day makes it hard both to maintain track if the vessel deviates as well as to establish a routine operations profile. One or more of those passes may be corrupted due to co-channel interference from a source that is only on the air at a specifics time. Having more collection opportunities might overcome this situation, which we believe to be a very real potential problem.

“The number of AIS transmitters in such areas as the Straits of Malacca or the English Channel may create a dense signal environment where co-channel interference will be much more problematic as you go higher and see more signals,” Thomas says. “More collection opportunities will allow for more opportunities in these dense environments.”

Beyond TacSat-2, the Coast Guard MDA team has set its sights on flying another payload on TacSat-4, scheduled to be launched in 2008. “We have made our needs known to them and hope they will be considered. We suspect they will,” Thomas says. The Department of Defense “likes to have us onboard because we have different authorities for data collection.”

International contributions also are being made to the MDA programs. The International Maritime Organization is establishing an international data center where all ships of a certain size will send location data automatically four times per day via the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System which employs Inmarsat-C satellite communications technology. For example, coastal nations will be able to access updated ship tracking data not only about vessels inbound to their own ports but also data from vessels in transit through their coastal waters up to 1,000 miles offshore.

“Satellites are key to transparency in the deep ocean,” says Goward, adding that the AIS will be enhanced by the scheduled launch of an Orbcomm satellite equipped with an AIS receiver in the second quarter. The Coast Guard MDA team has had a contract with Orbcomm for several years to place an AIS receiver in low Earth orbit, and Orbcomm has announced plans to include the AIS receivers in many of its future communications satellites.

In a related effort, the University of Miami’s Center for Southeastern Tropical Advanced Remote Sensing conducted a demonstration in fall 2006 in which a combination of seven civilian satellites detected and tracked vessels transiting from the Eastern Mediterranean to the East Coast of the United States. “These are the first tentative explorations of the use of commercial space assets for MDA. We are very pleased with the results,” says Goward. “Through this form of remote detection and tracking, we will be able to detect any anomalies sooner and focus scarce enforcement and interdiction resources more effectively.”

In addition, the Coast Guard has been leading an effort with the Department of Defense to explore the best way to share the AIS data using service-oriented architecture technologies. “AIS data sharing and the creation of a community of interest across [a service-oriented architecture] has been easier to accomplish than we thought,” says Goward.

If this MDA service-oriented architecture-related activity is not synchronized with the planned creation of an Integrated Common Analytical Viewer in the geospatial infrastructure at Homeland Security, it may well be in the future. There are discussions under way focused on evolving this into an international asset as well. “We are looking at all options, including work being done by other [Homeland Security] organizations, [Department of Defense and Department of Justice], and the private sector. We certainly intend to leverage off this work, but we have many more requirements and thus need a very robust system of systems, says Thomas. The Integrated Common Analytical Viewer “may well be one of the systems we interface to via our envisioned [service-oriented architecture]. I think of it as a set of several star networks, linked at several points, with the ability to go to any point via a series of data gateways, routers and guards.”

Data sharing technologies and common operating picture formation strategies aside, the versatility of satellite communications and how it influences the development of homeland security operational concepts could be seen in two very different settings and two very different applications in 2006 at the U.S. Navy’s Trident Warrior 06 exercise and the Australian Northwest Shelf trial.

In the Trident Warrior exercise, a modified Predator B known as the Mariner 2 Demonstrator was launched from the Gray Butte Flight Operations Facility in Palmdale, Calif., under line-of-sight communications. Control was transferred to a satellite communications link both during transit to the operations area and throughout the mission.

Control was maintained from Gray Butte via satellite, while payload data and imagery was received at Gray Butte and relayed via another satellite to Lockheed Martin’s Global Vision Center at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center facility in San Diego. The Global Vision Center served as the mission control center for the Trident Warrior exercise, taking tasking from the Department of Homeland Security and the Navy using voice over Internet protocol, giving directions to the flight crew at Gray Butte, and disseminating imagery and data to the Navy and Department of Homeland Security agencies that needed it.

Mariner 2, outfitted with an AIS receiver as well as a maritime surface search radar and an electro-optical/infrared camera system, demonstrated that an unmanned aircraft can seek out, identify and track high-interest targets at sea for long durations from a long distance while flowing multi-sensor intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance data instantaneously back to operational control centers via satellite. During Trident Warrior, Mariner 2 also demonstrated if could search offshore and coastal zones that exceed 65,000 square nautical miles — scanning coastal shipping lanes with extremely dense traffic using the AIS — and conduct surveillance operations over zones exceeding 100,000 square nautical miles.

For the Australian Northwest Shelf trial, the Mariner 2 was launched in Northwest Australia under line-of-sight communications and control was transferred to the Australian Integrated Ground Environment via satellite communications during transit to the operations area. Once the mission was underway, all mission control, multi-agency coordination and data sharing was conducted from the Integrated Ground Environment. This architecture is well suited for Department of Homeland Security operations where a single centralized command and control center oversees all flight operations involving multiple aircraft flying out of several sites akin to what is under way at the CBP Air and Marine Operations Center involving the Predators based in the Southwest and Grand Forks, N.D.

The Australian Northwest Shelf trial centered on tracking and smuggling interdiction, complimenting what is under way at the Center for Southeastern Tropical Advanced Remote Sensing, while the Trident Warrior exercise ties to the Navy’s combat-at-sea-oriented Forcenet and Broad Area Maritime Surveillance programs. But the network-centric toolsets and service-oriented architecture-related technologies present in both cannot be neatly separated or sorted into two distinct activities. Persistent situational awareness with a satellite edge was present during both exercises.