OCEANS-18: monitoring undetected vessels in high risk maritime areas

OCEANS-18 (Optical Camera for Earth and Naval Sighting) is a project approved and financed by the University of Padua. Its aim is to locate vessels who are deprived of localization instrumentation, in particular refugee vessels, that in the past years have become a concerning matter in terms of security and have moved governments to spend millions of euros attempting to prevent accidents on the Mediterranean Sea. The project consists in the assembling and evaluation of the engineering model of a CubeSat (3U), whose goal is to provide monitoring data that will be post-processed, and the detection algorithm, which will be developed with data provided by third party companies. The test will be made through a stratospheric balloon flight on July 2018. The project is currently under development and the final results will be delivered by the end of September 2018 to the University; the expected results are the detection, broadcasting and cross-referencing of the spotted vessels in order to identify the ones who do not figure on the radar.