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GREENBELT, Md. — NASA unveiled a new satellite-based system Monday that space agency officials say should reduce the time needed to locate lost boaters and hikers to just seconds.
"Our mission is to take the 'search' out of search-and-rescue technology," said Dave Affens, the search and rescue mission manager at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, an agency sometimes criticized for not focusing enough on Earth-bound problems.
"Our ultimate goal here is to save lives," Affens said.
Designed and developed at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, DASS — the Distress Alerting Satellite System — will be able to locate emergency beacons carried by aircraft, boats and hikers almost instantaneously, officials said.
Help could be on the way in minutes. The current Search and Rescue Satellite system might take an hour or more.
The new technology won't be operational until the hardware can be fully deployed aboard a constellation of 24 new U.S. Air Force Global Positioning System satellites. Nine are already in orbit, but the rest may not get there until 2017 or later, officials said.
In the meantime, the existing satellite rescue system continues to save lives — more than 27,000 worldwide to date. Air Force and Coast Guard authorities Monday urged anyone setting off in boats, planes or on foot into the wilderness, to consider carrying a satellite beacon — costs range from $200 to $700 for the handheld models, $800 to $1,500 for those used on boats — and to make sure it is registered.
One life the current system did save belongs to Dennis Clements. The Missouri man set out last Dec. 26 from Norfolk, Va., bound for Culebra, an island off the eastern tip of Puerto Rico.
He soon found himself alone, 250 miles off the Carolina coast, where he and his craft, the Gloria Adios, were pounded for four days by gale-force winds and tall waves.
"At one point, I saw the mast pointed straight down to the bottom of the sea," he said in a video interview with University of Maryland Baltimore County researcher Silvia Stoyanova. "I was shaken loose somewhere under water, and when I reached the surface, I could see my boat about 30 feet away."
As he tried desperately to swim to the craft, it righted itself, caught a breeze and sailed out of reach. "As I floated there, I knew this was the end," he said.
It wasn't. The Gloria Adios carried an Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon, or EPIRB, which activated automatically when the boat began taking on water.
Capt. David McBride, chief of the Coast Guard's Office of Search and Rescue, said too few boaters carry the devices. "Many people think they're going to use cell phones or radio," he said. But one big wave can quickly put those devices out of commission.
"The only means you'll have to notify anybody is the EPIRBs or ELTs (Emergency Locator Transmitters used on airplanes)," he said. "They're the only ones designed to work in that emergency for a specific length of time." Hand-held Personal Locator Beacons, or PLBs, must be activated manually.
Clements' beacon was picked up by orbiting weather satellites, where NASA-developed repeaters relayed the call to a ground station in Suitland, Md. There, computers did the math to calculate his location.
From Suitland, Clements' identity and position were sent to the Air Force Rescue Coordination Center, at Tyndall Air Force Base, in Florida, which receives 15 to 25 similar alerts every day. The center alerted the Coast Guard, and Clements was eventually rescued by a Navy diver
While the Air Force continues to launch DASS-equipped GPS satellites, NASA is beginning to build the satellite ground stations. Four satellite-tracking antennas are already working at Goddard. More are being planned for Hawaii, Florida, Australia and northeastern Canada.
In addition, search-and-rescue authorities in Europe, Russia and China are building their own DASS-compatible search-and-rescue satellite systems, which will work in concert with the United States' network. In all, some 40 countries are participating in the current system.
Tomko also noted that signals from any beacon registered in the U.S., no matter where they go off, are routed to the Air Force Rescue Coordination Center in Florida.
"We call rescue centers globally to ... make sure they're working that mission," he said. "We still protect our citizens."
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