Weather Satellite

USING WEATHER SATELLITES TO SAVE LIVES If a special weather satellite had not been available when Serge Goriely's four wheel drive Citroen whipped out of control in a remote African desert, he might not be alive today. Goriely, a 21 year old professional racecar driver, suffered a fractured skull and lay motionless beside his crushed vehicle after it crashed, rolled over several times, and threw him out unconscious into the tightly packed desert sand.

Fortunately, his car was equipped with an experimental search and rescue beacon that was automatically activated when his car went off the road. Immediately, it began sending a distress signal into space that was relayed back to Paris, where it was picked up only 17 minutes later. A medical specialist was promptly flown to the scene of the accident, arriving there 79 minutes after the crash. He patched Goriely back together, then admitted him to a nearby hospital for several days of recuperation before his colleagues knew for sure that he would live long enough to join the 344 others whose lives had been saved by a search and rescue satellite called SARSAT.

Teams of technicians in the United States, Canada, France, the former Soviet Union, and seven other participating countries work together to make sure SARSAT stays on the air. Emergency beacons space age cries for help stream up to the satellites from planes, boats, and even battered racecars for immediate retransmission by American and Russian satellites. Relay stations on the ground then pass the information on to rescue centers assigned to dispatch appropriate rescue forces. The satellites are designed to relay specially coded messages that tell who (or what) is in trouble and the approximate location of the distress beacon.

Before the SARSAT system was available, average notification time for a missing aircraft was 36 to 48 hours. However, studies show that, if lives are to be saved, rescue must usually be accomplished within 24 hours. With four active SARSATs in the constellation, an emergency signal from Africa, or any other remote location, can always be picked up by ground monitoring systems within 1 hour.