MOSCOW, July 13. /TASS/. Signals sent by the GLONASS and GPS satellites have been suggested to be used for radar location of large waves in oceans, a report of the Conference on Current Aspects of Remote Sensing of Earth from Space says.
"The appearance of numerous navigation satellites made it viable to study the possible use of reflected navigation signals for radar location of the water and Earth’s surfaces," the report says.
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For this, it was proposed to look into the possible launch of a space object with a signal receiver for navigation systems and a multi-beam antenna into the near-Earth orbit (400 km above the Earth), so that signals reflected from the Earth’s surface could be received from ten or more navigation satellites. In this case, one satellite will be able to sense the whole Earth’s surface in twenty-four hours.
This technology may be used to measure movement on the Earth’s surface, sea surface parameters, including unsafe sea monitoring and tsunami early warning, as well as the speed and direction of the wind over the sea surface, ice thickness in polar regions and monitoring object movements on the Earth’s surface.
The report reiterates that the first experiments with bistatic radiolocation (in which a transmission unit and a receiver are located far from each other and move at different speeds regarding the studied object) of the Earth from space were carried out in Russia in 1989-1998 with the use of the Mir space station. Geostationary satellites radiated radio waves to the Earth, and the Mir station received the reflected signal. The outcome analysis showed the efficiency and potential of the suggested method of bistatic radiolocation.