UNSW Sydney engineers are developing new satellite technology that can be used to determine the state of the seas as well as a number of other useful applications.
Real-time information about wild seas and unfavourable ocean conditions could be used to make shipping more safe and efficient thanks to passive radar technology being developed by UNSW Sydney engineers. And the technology has also piqued the interest of the Australian Defence Force because of its ability to ‘see’ through cloud and tree cover while maintaining radio silence.
Professor Andrew Dempster of UNSW’s School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications has been developing and trialling a new type of receiver that looks for satellite navigation signals bounced from the Earth’s surface in a process called reflectometry.
As he explains, reflectometry looks at the GPS signals that come directly from satellites as well as where, and at what angle, the signals bounce off the earth’s surface. He and his colleagues have built four generations of receivers that are designed to look for these bounced GPS signals from satellites overhead.
“This most recent generation of our GPS receivers we have put into space aboard CubeSats,” Professor Dempster says, who is also director of the Australian Centre of Space Engineering Research.
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