Maritime domain awareness
Vessel detection and dark-ship analysis across your waters: SAR imaging that sees through cloud and darkness, cross-referenced against AIS transponder data to flag the ships that are broadcasting nothing.
Sensors
- Sentinel-1 SAR: C-band radar, all weather, day and night, around 6 to 12 day revisit per point
- AIS feeds: ship transponder positions, cross-referenced against what the radar actually sees
- Commercial SAR tasking: ICEYE / Capella class, sub-metre, on client licence where cadence demands it
The dark-ship problem
A ship that wants to be seen broadcasts AIS. A ship running sanctions, fishing illegally or loitering near a cable does not. The standard method for detecting dark ships with satellite imagery is simple to state: image the sea with radar, detect every vessel-sized return, subtract every vessel that was broadcasting, and study what remains.
Radar matters because the interesting ships move at night and under weather. Optical imagery of an empty cloud deck answers nothing. Sentinel-1 sees the sea surface regardless, and its archive is open, which means the baseline of normal traffic in your waters costs nothing to establish.
What the product delivers
A recurring picture of your exclusive economic zone: detected vessels, AIS-matched vessels, and the residue of unmatched contacts ranked by how much their behaviour deserves attention. Port congestion counts and anchorage dwell times come from the same processing at no extra cost.
Delivery is a report and a feed, at a cadence set by the revisit of the sensors you are willing to pay for. Open-data-only gives you days. Commercial SAR tasking brings that down to hours over a named area. We are explicit about which cadence a given budget buys, because a maritime picture that arrives too late is a historical document.
Who asks for this
Coastguards and fisheries ministries with large water and small fleets. Navies that want cueing, not surveillance coverage they already own. Insurers and commodity desks tracking specific hulls. The analysis is the same; the delivery security differs.