The European Union Sixth Framework research programme’s Global Monitoring for Security and Stability (GMOSS) project has made progress on software processing capabilities for improved image intelligence from commercial satellites.
GMOSS’s remote sensing technology projects include applications for border surveillance, infrastructure monitoring and early warning.
The best military satellites can provide image resolutions of 300mm (12in), but commercial satellites’ 2m resolution images can provide a lot of information for certain applications.
GMOSS researchers have made progress in techniques that could enable nuclear- and chemical-processing activity to be detected with non-military systems. The European Space Agency’s (ESA) ERS-1 and ERS-2 synthetic-aperture radar satellites could be used to detect the characteristics of heat plumes from nuclear reactor coolant systems, for example.
“We can say we can make [identification characteristics] available to the interpreters now,” says Bhupendra Jasani, a visiting professor at London-based King’s College’s war studies department and a team leader on GMOSS’s treaty monitoring work.
In parallel with the GMOSS work, Jasani is involved with a consortium of organisations that are seeking to develop a hyperspectral sensor package for a satellite. With a wide-bandwidth capability, this could detect chemicals given off from uranium mining activities.
GMOSS is part of the European Commission and European Space Agency Global Monitoring Environment and Security initiative.
Source: Flight International