Ever wonder what the world's sea traffic would look like from space? If so, here's an interesting piece from NASA and the ESA,
"Space Station Keeps Watch on World's Sea Traffic":
As the International Space Station circles Earth, it has been tracking individual ships crossing the seas beneath. An investigation hosted by the European Space Agency (ESA) in its Columbus module has been testing the viability of monitoring global maritime traffic from the station's orbit hundreds of miles (kilometers) above since June 2010.
The ship-detection system being tested is based on the Automatic Identification System, or AIS, the marine equivalent of the air traffic control system.
All international vessels, cargo ships above certain weights and passenger carriers of all sizes must carry "Class A" AIS transponders, broadcasting continually updated data, such as identity, position, course, speed, ship particulars, cargo and voyage information to and from other vessels and shore.
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The results of the analyses have been very good. On a good day, approximately 400,000 ship position reports are received from more than 22,000 different ship identification numbers (Maritime Mobile Service Identity, or MMSI). In a summary made in Oct. 2011, the total number of position reports received exceeded 110 million messages from more than 82,000 different MMSI numbers.
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The Vessel Identification System, or VIS, could potentially be beneficial to many European entities, particularly in assisting them in law enforcement, fishery control campaigns, maritime border control, maritime safety and security issues, including marine pollution surveys, search and rescue and anti-piracy. Various service entities have already been asking to get access to the VIS data, which is continuously acquired on Columbus.
Here's the image of
one day's traffic:
Sea commerce, sea lines of communication, choke points, oh my!
A cracking post on a cracking site. Oh btw, by "cracking" I mean "good."
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