Capstone Team Presentation to be Webcast Live
The Space Studies Capstone Conference takes place the week of May 7-13 on the UND campus. The Capstone team presentation is scheduled for Wednesday, May 11th from 9 am to noon in Ryan Hall, room 111. The subject of this year’s capstone project is “Providing Space-Based Services to Remote Areas”, which was also the same theme for this spring’s colloquium series. The capstone team members are Mark Bigley, Greg Carras, Lee Graves and Charles Hammond.
Their team presentation will be webcast live beginning at 9 a.m. Central time via ConnectPro. Those that want to watch may go to http://connect.aero.und.edu/capstone_2011/ and sign in as a guest, using your full name.
More about their presentation:
Arctic Maritime Search and Rescue
As a result of its latitude, satellite services from geosynchronous orbit provide limited coverage in the Arctic. Low-Earth orbiting satellites can provide higher signal strength, but pass quickly overhead rendering simple stationary receiving dishes useless. Due to the sparse population of the Arctic, most businesses will not expend resources to focus on the Arctic since the economic incentive from a small distributed economic base is not present. However, with the advent of global warming, sea lanes in the arctic are opening up which will drive increased use for tourism, fishing, freight shipping, and development of arctic resources among other activities. With this increased use comes a higher rate of incidents that may require external rescue support. As a matter of public safety, the current space-based search and rescue (SAR) capabilities in the Arctic need to be enhanced to support this increased use – enhanced to the level provided at lower latitudes.
This Capstone report examines the functional requirements of the customer of space-based search and rescue in the Arctic. The primary objective of this report is to provide an engineering solution that satisfies these SAR requirements for activity in the North American Arctic. A secondary objective is to extend this SAR coverage to the entire Arctic.
For many years, the region of the Arctic has not been addressed adequately for space-based search and rescue. It is the intent of this report to provide a path forward for implementation these SAR services to a region that will experience a growing need as sea lanes open up to increased travel.