AIRBORNE SURVEILLANCE: Improved pollution control off eastern Canada

July 1, 2006
Recently, Swedish Space Corp. (SSC) delivered its first MSS 6000 maritime surveillance system to Transport Canada, reports Christer Colliander, project manager for airborne systems.

Recently, Swedish Space Corp. (SSC) delivered its first MSS 6000 maritime surveillance system to Transport Canada, reports Christer Colliander, project manager for airborne systems. SSC will also assist with installation of the equipment on a Dash 8 aircraft, and provide air crew and maintenance training, The equipment is being used mainly for pollution and fishing control operations off the country’s east coast.

Swedish Space Corporation�s MSS 6000 maritime surveillance system was installed on a Polish border guard aircraft earlier this year.

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The company has also installed an MSS 6000 in an M28 aircraft operated by Polskie Zaklady Lotnicze, on behalf of the Polish border guard. Here the aircraft is used for the protection of Poland’s - and the EU’s - land and sea borders.

Elsewhere, the company completed last year an extensive upgrade of the existing MSS 5000 systems used by the Norwegian Pollution Control Authority (SFT). This exercise included the installation of some features of the MSS 6000, notably the airborne AIS - automatic identification of ships - system.

This year the Portuguese air force has awarded SSC a contract to upgrade three maritime surveillance systems originally supplied by the company in the early 1990s to the new MSS 6000 system standard. This exercise will involve a radical modernization of both hardware and software in the data processing and sensor presentation systems installed on the customer’s CASA 212 aircraft. The SLAR (side-looking airborne radar) and IR/UV (infra-red/ultra-violet) line scanner systems will also be modernized, while new camera and video camera systems will be added with fully digital processing and recording.

Upgrading the sensor presentation system will provide numerous new features, giving the operator in the aircraft a much improved situation overview. The electronic map display is tightly integrated with the sensor data being recorded. This data is correlated with a continuous log of the operator’s own observations to generate a comprehensive database of observations and recordings, also facilitating the preparation of a structured report of the mission results.

For more information contact Christer Colliander, Swedish Space Corporation. Tel +46 8627 6328, fax +46 898 7069,[email protected], www.ssc.se