
NASA Search and Rescue Partners
With Australian Space Research Center, SmartSat CRC
NASA’s Search and Rescue office has
entered into a collaboration with the SmartSat
Cooperative Research Center (CRC), a consortium of
universities and other research organizations, partnered
with industry and funded by the Australian government.
The Search and Rescue office — based at NASA’s Goddard
Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland — will
provide SmartSat CRC with NASA expertise to advance
distress-related communications and navigation
technology benefitting the U.S. and Australia.
“We’re proud to lend the
engineering expertise of our Search and Rescue office as
SmartSat CRC works on next-generation rescue
technologies,” said Goddard Deputy Director for Research
and Technology Investments Christyl Johnson. “Goddard is
excited about this new partnership and the new
capabilities that it will foster.”
For more than 30 years, NASA’s
Search and Rescue office has researched and developed
technology for Cospas-Sarsat, an international effort to
provide satellite-aided distress location data to first
responders worldwide. The first phases of their
collaboration with SmartSat CRC will involve
enhancements to NASA-developed second-generation
emergency beacon technology. These beacons improve upon
existing beacon technology, offering significantly
increased accuracy and a host of other benefits to users
globally.
Specifically, SmartSat CRC will
propose new designs for the 406 MHz signal sent by
beacons through the Cospas-Sarsat network. These new
designs will further modernize second-generation
beacons, which take advantage of encoding techniques not
available when the Cospas-Sarsat network was developed
in the 1970s. SmartSat CRC will also work on systems
that offer enhanced services to users, emergency
management professionals and first responders.
“SmartSat CRC’s research could
result in enormous benefits to the global search and
rescue effort,” said NASA Search and Rescue Mission
Manager Lisa Mazzuca. “This collaboration has the chance
to further revolutionize beacon technology and may
pursue bold future augmentations of the search and
rescue network.”
Future phases of the SmartSat CRC
collaboration could support exploration initiatives like
the Artemis missions, which will return humans to the
Moon for the first time since Apollo. NASA will equip
Artemis astronauts with second-generation beacons for
use if needed for egress from capsule after splashdown
or a launch abort scenario. The Search and Rescue team
is working to extend beacon services to the lunar
surface with the LunaNet communications and navigation
architecture.
“This collaboration opens the door
to a lot of possibilities for the Australian space
community,” said SmartSat CRC CEO and Managing Director
Andy Koronios. “We are delighted to be partnering with
Goddard’s Search and Rescue office; This partnership
begins our relationship with NASA, joining their push
towards the Moon and beyond.”
NASA embraces partnerships to
empower the agency’s missions while passing the benefits
of space science and technology to everyone on Earth.
This collaboration with SmartSat CRC is one example of
the innovations that result from exploring together.
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