Homeland Security News

From press release of Cambridge Consultants:

The latest piracy statistics released by the International Maritime Bureau (IMB) Piracy Reporting Centre (PRC) point to a significant increase in attacks by pirates in the first nine months of 2008. According to a PRC press release, reported acts of piracy committed up to late October 2008 have included 115 vessels boarded, 31 vessels hijacked, and 23 vessels fired upon, seeing a total of 581 crew members taken hostage, nine kidnapped, nine killed and seven missing, presumed dead. The highly publicised seizures in November only highlight further the extent of this threat to the shipping industry.

Holographic radar is a non-scanning, continuously tracking 3D radar that provides persistent illumination of its field of view and can resolve and measure an object’s motion at fine scale, as well as its range and direction. It is currently being scaled up for use on wind farms to offer infill coverage for air traffic control and military surveillance radars, but if adapted appropriately for a marine surveillance application and placed at prominent points on a vessel’s superstructure, it would enable a crew to detect small boats and take evasive maneuvres or trigger self-defense mechanisms to repel a pirate attack.

“Current ship-based radar systems are designed to prevent collisions at sea, or to detect threats from the sky,” continues Oswald. “They do this by scanning the surveillance zone, emitting a pulsed beam and detecting the reflections from moving objects. This form of radar is simply not suited to close quarters surveillance of an environment that, like the sea, moves and changes shape. Our holographic radar technology is designed for exactly this sort of application.”