 Good afternoon. At NOAA SAR SET, we're responsible basically for monitoring emergency alerts and then sending those alerts directly through our ground systems and our communication systems to search and rescue authorities. And in the U.S. that would be the Coast Guard or the Air Force because they're the ones that are mandated to do SAR in the United States. Now what do I mean by distress alerts? Basically, if you're in trouble anywhere in the world and you have a specific device that I'm going to talk about here in a minute, you can activate that device and our satellites will locate your position and then send that to search and rescue forces and they'll be able to find you. So these are the devices I was talking about. They're emergency beacons and some already existed before this program. These are emergency locator transmitters and they were located. They were used on aircraft even before the system. And the limiting factor there was another airplane had to be up and monitor the frequency that these ELTs were giving off. So it was a much smaller search area than you have now with the satellites because basically with the satellites you can search the entire earth and with the aircraft you can only search specific areas and you had to worry about weather and you had to worry about fuel and you had to worry about your budget for the various search and rescue agencies. But now being a worldwide program monitored by satellite it's offered a lot of help and assistance to people over the years. And the different types of beacons have grown. Instead of just aircraft now they have beacons for ships. These are called e-perbs, emergency position indicating radio beacons. If you ever watched The Deadliest Catch and you hear some beeping going off on the radio or something they're talking about these e-perbs. And now even individuals like if you're a hiker going off in the Grand Canyon or if you're a skier out in the Rocky Mountains or Kayaker down in the Florida Keys or something you can wear one of these on your person so if you get in trouble that you can activate it and somebody will come find you. This has become a cottage industry and companies that were already involved with search and rescue equipment like Rescue Lights and PFDs, life jackets that sort of thing started manufacturing these and there's about a million and a half worldwide in the population right now. So some other advancements that have happened since the experiments with Nimbus we started using geostationary satellites as well as the polar orbiting and this gave some better capabilities. For one we've got a much larger search area at any given time with the orbiting satellites. There was a 2,500 mile diameter footprint. So if you were in trouble and you turned on your device right after the satellite passed you then you might be waiting there for a while until that next satellite passed over. So maybe 20 or 40 minutes after you press that button before we have received that signal to the satellite. Geostationary has a footprint that is basically almost the entire size of the hemisphere. So if you're anywhere north or south America pretty much as long as you're not near the poles that geostationary satellite can see almost incidentally when you light off your beacon. Another advancement was a few years back in the 80s we had GPS in the late 80s early 90s we were able to get the GPS signal put on our beacons. So when you turn on the beacon there's a GPS chip in there it can initialize with the GPS satellite and then send that GPS position straight to the geostationary satellite or the polar orbiting satellite and we'd be able to have the type of position information we got previously with the Nimbus-derived location protocols and also with the GPS protocol. So the Coast Guard gets both those types of information still. On the program side Sarsat has grown a lot. It started as an international program and it's still international. There's a lot of international collaboration international organizations involved with the UN make recommendations for carriage. So for instance the international maritime organization will mandate carriage for commercial ships for the so they're involved with the EPIRBs an international civil aviation organization or IKO will be involved with mandating the use of emergency locator transmitters and then you have the international telecommunications union ITU which basically tells you know the world to stay away from that 406 megahertz frequency is what is what our beacons use and it protects that frequency from radio stations and communications companies from using that frequency so it's dedicated for for search and rescue throughout the world and likewise talking about we talked earlier about how this was developed with the United States, Canada and France and Russia at the time and if you remember back in the 70s we weren't too friendly with Russia on most things but we were able to find agreement here now that there are over 43 countries that participate directly with this program and they actually have you know input into how the program is run but there's even more countries involved with the search and rescue aspect so all these countries in green are actually receiving the alerts but they may push that information out to those countries around them to their various search and rescue organizations so you know basically this entire map should be green with the exception with with some exceptions possibly north Korean Iran or something might not be on board but pretty much the entire world is tied into to this system now for search and rescue then on a national level you know several agencies govern its use Noah has oversight now NASA developed it but since they were weather satellites under the auspice of Noah that SARSat program became came under under us so we coordinate with again the Air Force for inland SAR the Coast Guard for maritime and and we still work with NASA there's a group over here that does research and development for SARSat and we coordinate on a daily basis with well at least a quarterly basis with with meetings and such with with them here and I think Lisa Dr. Lisa Mazuka heads that she's with NASA and then on the flip side SARSat is directly involved with the national search and rescue committee and we're involved with the national search and rescue plan so we we advise them with SARSat developments SARSat has been seamlessly integrated into the search and rescue community within the United States you can see here the Air Force and the Coast Guard have lines drawn for their responsibilities here the various Coast Guard districts here and what happens is when we get alert it goes through our our servers electronically so we don't even see it and then it goes to the Air Force and Coast Guard search and rescue programs so here you see a screenshot of the Coast Guard's search and rescue program that they use and these are actual alerts that are from our satellites that just pop up on their screen and they'll they can gather all the information right at their fingertips as we saw earlier you can basically be in the most remote parts of the world and the satellites can locate you and here's an example this young lady named Abby Sutherland wanted to be the youngest person either the youngest person or youngest female I'm not sure which to start going to navigate the globe alone so she set out and she made it all the way to the South Indian Ocean and then she got involved in this huge storm with 30 and 40 foot seas her boat rolled over several times went underwater several times popped back up her mast broke in half and she lost most of her communication she had a sat phone but for some reason wasn't able to to use it to call out but she did have the EAPER and it did what it was supposed to do and they were able to find her so we were talking about remoteness the closest land she was near you know that's about as far away from land as you could possibly get you know so she had a better chance of going down to Antarctica than going over there to Australia anyway she was so grateful she came by to visit us at her office in Suitland and to learn more about the system so here's our building here this is the back of our building but if you went over to the front you would see three smaller dishes and that's those are sarset dishes that we use right above our building so that was just one example since these numbers are from 1982 when we formally took over the program but in the United States there's been over 7400 saves and worldwide there been over 37,000 so generally once a year around 250 saves occurred because of sarset and we count those if sarset was the only or the primary use of finding that location so if someone calls the Coast Guard on the radio and then their boat sinks but the Coast Guard responds because of the radio contact then we won't count it but if the Coast Guard responds only because of location information from the E-PIRB or ELT or PLB then we count it as a save so so anyway in the US about 250 a year are saved and then worldwide about 2,000 a year are saved and that number keeps going up with the amount of beacons that are bought per year so it's getting you know even more and more as the beacon population increases there's NOAA is reaching well our NOAA weather satellites are reaching the end of their service life and so for the past 30 some odd years we've been using basically the same technologies that were available from the Nimbus program so it's been a very long and productive use of that technology and the next set of satellites that are going to go up where we can put sarset equipment on are our GPS satellites and since this is an international program we have other international partners so Europe's Galileo satellites are similar to our GPS their global navigation system will have this on it as well and the Russian GLONASS system will also have it and that's Russia's version of GPS that's their positioning system what this will give sarset is a better location availability when these satellites are up there will be about 72 satellites in the in the in the constellation and with that number of satellites anywhere on earth should be in view of four satellites at any any given time so basically the entire earth will have 100 coverage 100 out of time with the the MEOSAR system so as soon as someone turns on their beacon now then almost instantly we'll know within a couple of meters where someone is versus a couple hundred yards or a couple you know several kilometers so you know we've gone from several kilometers to several hundred yards to two or three meters of accuracy and the timing keeps getting better to you also another advantage is the size of the of the watt circle for lack of better word to call it if you see the the polar orbiting satellites that's that 2500 mile diameter here you have almost as large of diameter as the geostationary satellites and then imagine 72 of those overlapping each other so much more capability so we've had a 30-year run of using the Nimbus technology and now we're reaching the end of that and going ahead for 30 more years and it's all thanks to NASA and their development team and we certainly are better off for having it