Dubai impound ships suspected in cable damage
Martin Hannigan
hannigan at gmail.com
Wed Apr 9 15:15:03 UTC 2008
On Wed, Apr 9, 2008 at 6:14 AM, Steven M. Bellovin <smb at cs.columbia.edu> wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, 08 Apr 2008 22:16:57 -0700
> Joel Jaeggli <joelja at bogus.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > Patrick Giagnocavo wrote:
> > >
> > > Sean Donelan wrote:
> > >
> > >> Awesome, so could anyone buy a copy of the same images? Which
> > >> satellite do you think happened to be taking images of the area
> > >> with these ships near the time the cables were broken? Which
> > >> company is selling that set of images?
> > >
> > > Wouldn't it be reasonable that, when the break occurred, they used
> > > their optical time domain reflectometer to compute the approximate
> > > location of the break, and then just called around for whoever had
> > > the best images, or who could quickly task the satellite to get an
> > > image?
> >
> > spot can generally deliver an image within 1 day in 60kmx60km blocks
> > assuming no contention for the slot. 20m resolution is more than
> > adequate to pick up ships underway at sea. ikonos can deliver 11x11km
> > swaths.
> >
> Right, but those images would be after the fact.
>
> Assume the ship is moving at 10 knots, which is 18.5 km/hr. In 24
> hours, it can go about 450 km. You can't go south from Alexandria by
> ship, except into the Suez canal, but you can go about that far east
> (eyeballing Google Maps...) before you reach Israel or
> Israeli-controlled waters. A semicircle of that radius has an area of
> about 320,000 km^2. You'd need about 100 images (88 by sheer area, but
> you won't get an exact match); the pictures alone would cost a
> minium of $100K, according to
> http://www.spotimage.fr/automne_modules_files/standard/public/p425_ba582c667a21f3b7d1108ad9773629fdSPOT_Commercial_Price_List_-_Jan_2008_without_EULA.pdf
> and quite possibly considerably more. *Plus* there are a lot of ships
> to consider -- that area includes the northern terminus of the Suez
> Canal, and you want good enough evidence to take to a maritime court
> somewhere.
>
> It might be possible.
There are a number of unique characteristics of ships including
profile and radar fingerprint. I'd like to see the images from the
article that was forwarded to the list.
-M<
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