Maritime domain awareness: questions, answered — Satellize
Satellize
The picture across your EEZ

Maritime domain awareness

Vessel tracking that works on ships trying not to be tracked: radar, RF and optical sensing correlated across your exclusive economic zone, delivered to your own coast guard.

The basics
What is maritime domain awareness?
Knowing what is happening across your waters: which vessels are where, what they are doing and which ones are lying about it. For most coastal states the EEZ is the largest territory they govern and the least observed. Satellites are the only economic way to watch all of it.Maritime security
What is a dark vessel?
A ship operating with its AIS transponder off or falsified, usually because its business does not survive being watched: illegal fishing, smuggling, sanctions evasion. Radar and RF satellites detect ships regardless of what their transponders claim, which is the whole point.Maritime intelligence
What is AIS tracking?
The automatic identification system: transponders broadcasting each ship's identity, position and course, receivable from orbit. Indispensable and insufficient, because the vessels worth worrying about switch it off. Serious maritime awareness starts where AIS stops.Maritime intelligence
How do satellites track ships?
Four layers: AIS for the cooperative traffic, SAR to detect hulls in any weather, RF sensors to locate emitting radars, and optical imagery to identify specific vessels. Correlated together, they separate the fishing fleet from the fleet pretending to fish.Oceans domain
What is illegal fishing detection?
Finding vessels fishing where or when they must not: dark ships inside protected zones, transshipment meetings at sea, patterns that do not match declared activity. The output is enforcement-grade: positions, times and imagery a fisheries authority can act on and defend.Fisheries intelligence
Choosing and buying
How can a coast guard monitor an entire EEZ?
Not with patrol vessels alone; the arithmetic of hull-days against millions of square kilometres never closes. Satellites provide the wide-area detection and cueing, so patrols stop searching and start intercepting. The ships you own become several times more effective the day the picture arrives.Coast guard operations
Can satellites detect oil spills and marine pollution?
Yes. Radar sees oil films flattening the sea surface day or night; optical and hyperspectral sensors characterise them. Correlated with vessel tracks, a slick becomes a named ship, which turns pollution from a cleanup cost into an enforceable liability.Oceans domain
What is RF geolocation of vessels?
Detecting a ship's own radio and radar emissions from orbit and triangulating the source. A vessel can silence its AIS; it rarely sails blind with its navigation radar off. RF sensing finds the ships that have opted out of every cooperative system.RF intelligence
How is sanctions evasion at sea detected?
By pattern: ship-to-ship transfers in unusual anchorages, AIS gaps timed to port calls, identities swapped between hulls. Satellite radar and imagery timestamp these events regardless of transponder fiction, producing the evidentiary chain that enforcement and insurers require.Maritime security
Satellite vs coastal radar for maritime surveillance: which do we need?
Coastal radar owns the near shore, out to the horizon; satellites own everything beyond it. They are complements, not rivals. The expensive mistake is buying more coastal radar to solve a problem that lives three hundred kilometres offshore.Maritime security
In practice
How do you catch ships that turn off their AIS transponders?
Watch for the absence itself. An AIS track that goes dark and a SAR detection where no track exists are both signals, and correlating them over time builds each vessel's behavioural fingerprint. Ships lie; wakes, hulls and radar emissions do not.Maritime intelligence
What does a national maritime picture actually deliver to operators?
A live map where every detection is classified: matched to AIS, flagged dark, ranked by risk against watchlists and behaviour. Delivered into the coast guard's own operations room with tasking authority to look closer, not a foreign portal with a subscription.Coast guard operations
Can satellite data support prosecutions for illegal fishing?
It already does, in multiple jurisdictions. Time-stamped radar detections, imagery and track reconstructions corroborate boarding evidence and establish patterns single intercepts cannot. Data downlinked and processed under your own jurisdiction stands up better in court, one more argument for sovereign ground infrastructure.Fisheries intelligence
How quickly can a maritime alert reach a patrol vessel?
The chain is detection, downlink, processing, dissemination, and each link is a design choice. With ground stations in-country and automated processing, alerts reach an operations room within hours of the pass; a sovereign ground segment exists precisely to keep that chain short during the weeks that matter.Our Offerings
What maritime threats matter most for small island states?
Distant-water fishing fleets working the EEZ, transshipment laundering the catch, and traffic the state never sees because nobody is watching. For island states the EEZ is often hundreds of times the land area; awareness over it is not a luxury acquisition, it is most of the country.Oceans domain
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