NEW DELHI: The recent launch of three satellites by a US firm has given a boost to the Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness (IPMDA), which was launched by the Quad leaders last year to combat illegal fishing and to monitor “dark shipping”.
HawkEye 360, an American geospatial analytics company, launched and deployed the satellites with Rocket Lab, a public launch service provider, late last month. These satellites will be the first in the HawkEye constellation to be placed in an inclined orbit, “boosting revisit rates over the mid-latitude regions of the globe”, according to a statement from the company.
Few details have officially emerged of the exact role the satellites will play in IPMDA, though Ely Ratner, the US assistant secretary of defence for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs, highlighted their role in the Quad initiative in a tweet after their launch on January 24.
“Big day for the Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness (IPMDA). Today, we celebrated the launch of a new satellite cluster, which will deliver a faster, wider, and sharper maritime picture to partners across the region,” Ratner tweeted.
The bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs of the US state department said a new satellite “will help improve tracking of illicit activities, protect fisheries, and support climate & humanitarian response” as part of IPMDA. The bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs added the satellite will improve maritime domain awareness and “further promote a free, open, inclusive, secure, and prosperous Indo-Pacific”.
IPMDA, unveiled when the leaders of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue or Quad met in Japan in May 2022, was envisaged as a system that will “offer a near-real-time, integrated, and cost-effective maritime domain awareness picture” to allow countries in the Pacific Islands, Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean region to fully monitor regional waters and uphold a free and open Indo-Pacific.
A fact sheet issued last year by the White House said the Quad members will contribute to the region’s maritime domain awareness through investments in IPMDA over five years. The initiative will allow tracking of vessels that hide their identity, also called “dark shipping”, and other tactical-level activities, and improve the ability of countries to respond to climate and humanitarian events and to protect fisheries, the fact sheet said.
The Quad members also decided to use commercially available data, which is unclassified, so that it could be shared with a wide range of countries. IPMDA will also use information from existing regional naval fusion centres, such as India’s Information Fusion Center-Indian Ocean Region based in Gurugram, Singapore’s Information Fusion Center, the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency in the Solomon Islands and the Pacific Fusion Center in Vanuatu.
Once the HawkEye 360 satellites achieve initial operating capability, the firm will be able to “collect RF data as frequently as once per hour anywhere on earth, enabling the company to offer the most timely and actionable RF data and data analytics”, the firm said.
