Life-Saving Satellites

NASA GOES: Life-Saving Satellites - Search And Rescue: Saved By A Weather Satellite

When weather struck ... His only chance for survival, was a signal sent to space just before he was dragged under water. Denniss emergency beacon activated and transmitted a distress signal triggering a chain reaction into an intricate Search And Rescue Satellite-Aided Tracking System that has been saving lives since 1982. NASA, NOAA, the U.S. Air Force, and the U.S. Coast Guard are working together to eliminate this search, out of search and rescue to reduce the amount of time to reach victims in distress.

There have been over twenty seven thousand people saved by this system, many of which were been done by the GOES satellites. The GOES (Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites) weather satellites have the ability to constantly oversee a large area of the Earth, and send real time data to users. Every country that can see the GOES satellite is able to pick up the distress down link.

The beacon goes of and sends a message out to whoever can hear it. A GOES satellite if its in view of the beacon will see it and then itll take that message and just relay it, repeat it back down to the ground. If the distress is from an old beacon, which does not transmit its own location, then the GOES satellites provide an immediate alert. Then you wait until the POES satellite flies over and gives you the location.

These beacons can be encoded with GPS location and thats been an advancement over the last fifteen years. This allows us to not only speed up the rescue coordination effort but the chances of survival for someone in a distressed environment is pretty significant. That information thats coming from, directly from the distress beacon to the satellites is the one key link that we have to actually find out where something is happening and hopefully again if the beacon is registered, tells us who that beacon belongs to.

Technology developed by NASA and operated by NOAA led to a quick coast guard response and a challenging navy rescue. People take for granted the risks the rescue personnel, so anything we can do to minimize the area that they have to cover, the amount of hours they have to fly, is better for them.

A new system called the Distress Alerting Satellite System or DASS is currently being tested successfully at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. The Distress Alerting System will carry a search and rescue repeater on a complete constellation of satellites. In the case that the GPS systems that means twenty-four satellites will be lessening for victims all over the surface of the Earth.

With the new system the information that we get will be quicker, it will be more accurate from the instant that there is a distress happening out there. Once the system is fully operational the ultimate goal of eliminating the search out of search and rescue will be accomplished.

• http://www.nasa.gov/goes-p
• http://goes.gsfc.nasa.gov/text/goesfa...