Big Brother's eye in the sky

Deep in the Southern Ocean, the frigate HMNZS Te Mana is plunging through heavy seas, hunting for a rogue trawler poaching Patagonian toothfish from New Zealand waters.

On the bridge, a message flashes in from Sydney: a boat has been seen from space, sailing where none should be. As Te Mana swings to a new course, the captain smiles to himself: "Gotcha."

Far to the north, on the gentle slopes of Hawkes Bay, a winegrower casts an anxious eye at the slate grey clouds moving up from the south, bringing with them the probability of severe, crop-destroying hail.

The farmer keys a number into his mobile phone. His screen lights up with pictures from space, charting the course of the storm second-by-second. This time his property will escape.

Across the Tasman, the northern city of Darwin is bracing itself for another cyclone. Emergency services planners watch it swirl down towards the coast, generating winds and waves that can uproot trees, flatten buildings and smash bridges.

Armed with real-time images of the cyclone's passage, they order the evacuation of small settlements in its way and marshal the people and machinery needed to rush to help in its wake.

And in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, fire chiefs have just been told of a new, small blaze sparked by lightning deep in a wooded valley. Previously they would not have known it was there until it came roaring out of the hills in a huge, barely stoppable, inferno: now they can trap and kill the outbreak before it gathers anywhere near such mass and power.

All going well, these scenarios are just a few years off. The Australian Government last month gave its backing to the project that will make it work, with federal science agency CSIRO, the University of New South Wales and telecommunications company Optus. Australian defence and emergency service agencies are interested.

This is benign Big Brother, a new real-time eye in space that will become reality in 2008 when a satellite built by Ball Aerospace in Colorado settles into geostationary orbit 36,000km above the equator with seven sensors able to provide 24-hour coverage of a huge swathe of the planet, from India to Hawaii and down to about latitude 81deg south, where the curvature of the Earth begins to distort the image near the Antarctic icecap.

The imagery the satellite will provide is revolutionary, providing real-time pictures at the rate of one a second, compared to present best speeds of about one an hour.

Its designers claim its cameras will provide resolution 16 times better than the dramatic pictures of Hurricane Katrina taken by US space agency Nasa's low-orbit satellites.

This data will flow from space to Australia, where one of the world's fastest supercomputers will process it. Although developed in the US, the service is being based there because of the huge acceptance of 3G mobile phones, broadband internet and cable and satellite TV needed to deliver it.

"And there is a great need here," said Michael Hewins, managing director of AstroVision Australia, the company behind the project.

"There are tremendous issues, not only with severe weather, but with bushfires, and tremendous areas to cover with few resources.

"We see those frigates chasing illegal poachers, we hear about the huge fires in Canberra or the cyclones that sometimes surprise people. I was talking to some guys up in Samoa, where a fishing fleet lost a boat last year with six guys aboard, because their information on the weather prompted them to go in the wrong direction.

"That will never happen again. You may get caught in a storm - sometimes you're not going to have a choice - but if you do have a choice and you know exactly where the storm is you'll obviously make for a safe haven."

AstroVision Australia is a spin-off of AstroVision International, a venture-backed US company formed in 1992 by astrophysicist De Malcolm LeCompte, who narrowly missed final selection as a Nasa astronaut, and which later patented systems used by the space agency in deep space missions.

In the US, the potential of the system has sparked military as well as commercial interest, with discussions under way between the company and major defence customers such as the Air Force, Navy and Missile Defence Agency.

In Australia, AstroVision Australia is 51 per cent owned by locally listed Horizon Global Ltd, with exclusive rights to its parent's technology for a planned satellite footprint that includes Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, Indonesia, China and India.

"This is where we will start up, and where I believe will be the biggest market - we can see half the world's population," Hewins said.

The prospect has excited the Australian Government. It sees the direct benefits of a faster, more accurate eye in space and business and investment bonuses. Last month Canberra granted AstroVision major project facilitation status which, among other benefits, will help to smooth the tortured paths between local, state and federal bureaucracies.

High among the immediate attractions for Canberra are a projected 400 construction jobs, more than 100 full-time technical and executive positions, and forecast export revenue of up to A$500 million ($550 million) a year.

"This project is expected to establish a new level of imaging capability worldwide, creating benefits for Australia by generating exports, innovative technical capabilities and enhanced competitiveness for Australian industry," enthused Industry, Tourism and Resources Minister Ian Macfarlane.

Equally excited is the University of New South Wales, which will receive what School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Services senior lecturer Dr Ray Merton described as a "deluge of data" under an agreement with AstroVision.

Already AstroVision has teamed with CSIRO in a bid for a new contract for the federal coastal surveillance agency Coastwatch, and Macfarlane said the company was discussing possible applications with defence and emergency services.

So far no talks have been held with New Zealand. "I would do it in a heartbeat if I had the right connections," Hewins said. "We're a small company, so trying to see everybody is tough, but we would love to because I know, in fact, New Zealand is lacking weather coverage for sure, and one of the applications is simply for people on boats."

The potential lies in the bank of sensors aboard the new satellite, producing planet-wide scans every second, close-focus images with a 250m resolution within a range of 200 to 400km - sufficient to pick up an illegal fishing boat, for example - infra-red images to track changes in temperature, a lightning mapper able to give advance warnings of likely bushfires and storms such as tornadoes, low-light images for night surveillance, and multi-spectral images able to detect chlorophyll in the ocean, or volcanic ash in the atmosphere.

Second-by-second imagery would have profound advantages for emergency services preparing for violent and often unpredictable storms by pinpointing exactly where and when fronts will strike, and for farmers, who could use images on mobile phones to decide whether to move stock or protect crops.

"The tried and true statistic from the insurance business is that 90 per cent of the damage caused by natural disasters is caused by 10 per cent of the storms," Hewins said.

"Typically, excluding cyclones, there are rapidly intensifying storms such as tornadoes and hailstorms - things that come up quickly and move quickly - which right now we don't have the ability to detect. Once this is operating we'll be able to alert people live to things coming their way."

At sea, the satellite will be able to see boxes of ocean 1000km by 1000km. By detecting chlorophyll, and thus algae, it will be able to track fish. As well as helping commercial fishers, it will also help narrow the search for poachers, which it will be able to find and report to authorities.

And because the authorities know who should be where in their waters, the satellite will also be able to help find smugglers and refugee boats.

On land, the live tracking of storms and early detection of bushfires will help emergency services prepare for the worst and direct their resources exactly where they are needed, ahead of the disaster.

Hewins also predicts potential for major energy savings, helping to ease supply problems and power blackouts. "We are able to read temperatures live. You can see whether the temperature's changing, whether it's getting colder or hotter.

"Energy companies run by forecasting demand, and they're trying to predict when they are going to need to ratchet up their generators and where they're going to put electricity, and what they're doing now is reacting to temperature change.

"But if I know exactly when the temperature's going to change I can then turn on the generators, ratchet them up at the right moment - I'm managing the forecast demand exactly according to where it is and you don't get this huge spike because people suddenly turn on everything because it's too hot or too cold."

Sometimes Big Brother isn't so bad.