Australia is an island nation of more than eight million square kilometres in EEZ, with additional significant maritime interests in the Indo Pacific region. That reality lends itself to an enhanced space-based ISR capability and with that capability from Planet it would allow the Australian government to achieve better understanding, better resilience, and more avenues for strategic capability growth.
For example, traditional ISR seeks particular imagery through tasking of US, ally, or commercial space assets. Planet's Tom Farrow compares that to looking at an area of interest through a garden hose.
“If your government has a very wide area to surveille, then just tasking an image here and there based on your existing intelligence probably means you are going to have some gaps in your understanding of that area of interest,” he said.
Satellite imagery providers are certainly able to help close that gap, delivering requested imagery to the customer in a matter of hours. Yet terabytes of raw imagery data might not be that useful. Planet’s offer is far more comprehensive.
“If you could extract, say in a national disaster case, the boundary where the fire or flood was and just deliver that in near-real time to the customer, that would be far more meaningful than ‘hey here’s a bunch of imagery, go and do the analysis yourself’,” Farrow said.
That’s the value proposition Planet can offer Australia: the ability to draw useful insights from their long-accumulated data and enhance defence and intelligence outcomes.
As an example, Farrow cites Australia’s experience with the arrival of large numbers of asylum seekers aboard small boats, most setting out from ports in southern Java.
Asylum seekers fled Vietnam by boat in the 1970s and 80s but big numbers really started to reach Australian shores from 1999. That peaked in 2013 with the arrival of 300 boats carrying more than 20,000 people, many fleeing Iraq and Afghanistan, facing the risky voyage from Java to Australian waters.
Dealing with this influx strained the ADF. Its component of the national effort to manage such arrivals is called Operation Resolute and involves sea, air and land assets. Operation Resolute was launched in 2006 and continues to this day.
Should another crisis prompt mass people movements, that could start up all over again. For Australia, the locations of most interest would be the numerous small ports on the southern coast of Java. From those ports, fishers can also set out to illegally fish in Australian waters.
Farrow says through Planet the Australian government could task images of ports of interest and acquire very high resolution imagery, improving strategic outcomes and system resilience.
“Planet has developed what we call the Global Monitoring Service (GMS). This gives the ability to look at certain sites, let’s say all the ports on the southern side of Indonesia, and correlate over a period of time what patterns and trends look normal,” Farrow said.
“From there we can answer questions like: Are the occupancy rates of car parks just full 9–5 Monday to Friday for most of the time? That might indicate normal activity. All of a sudden we are seeing a ramp up of activity on multiple weekends. That might indicate unusual activity.
“Rather than the customer receiving all the imagery and deriving that insight themselves, we may have a contract that just provides alerts that something has changed. Therefore, they then need to go and take a high resolution image from Planet’s high resolution tasking satellites of that particular port.”
Farrow said this is about creating a baseline of normal activity that happens at a particular site, whether it is a port, airport or military garrison, with changes maybe indicating something that could pose a risk to Australia.
He further shared that Planet’s advantage extends beyond its satellite constellations. Its advanced analytical capabilities enrich EO-derived data, enhance Australia’s ISR capability suite, and can adapt to priority ISR requirements.
“Our added value is the extraction of insight from data. We are very much moving from what was once a space satellite company to a data as a service company delivering data and imagery to now trying to deliver solutions,” he said. “The two solutions really applying to defence and intelligence which should resonate with the Australian government are, firstly, strategic indications and warnings. This is the GMS capability,” he said.
“Then also there’s maritime domain awareness (MDA), using electro-optical imagery to track vessels and activity in the maritime domain.”
MDA is of considerable interest to Australia and not just to track foreign warships. The New York Times reported an incident where a Chinese task group circumnavigated the Australian territory last February–March. Australia is also a desirable market for international drug traffickers. Narco-subs, semi-submersible vessels, have been found on Pacific islands, their cargo destined for Australia.
In theory, legitimate vessels identify themselves by way of the Automatic Identification System (AIS), though that doesn’t apply to every vessel.
“While MDA is a multi-source challenge, the downside of pure reliance on an AIS signal is that for many of the ships that the Australian defence community operates – especially at a strategic level that would be of interest to operational commanders – is that the AIS will likely be (switched) off,” Brock Edwards, Planet’s Director of Global Development for Defence and Intelligence told ADM.
“In those cases, you need a broad area capability to find the ship and you need visual confirmation from an image.
“You also have to overlay an AI capability to detect and start to distinguish each of those types of ships and provide to users in a way that informs their decision making, not overwhelm it and integrate into a larger operational picture providing maritime domain awareness.”
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