When weather struck…
The Gloria A Dios was violently
rolled over. I was caught by my right
knee and dragged under the surface of the Atlantic.
saw her sail away and leave me there
and I was alone in the dark in the storm.
Two hundred and fifty miles off shore
I could feel the heat just draining out of me.
His only chance for survival, was a signal sent to space just before
he was dragged under water. Denniss’
emergency beacon activated and transmitted a distress signal
riggering a chain reaction into an intricate Search And Rescue
Satellite-Aided Tracking System that has been saving lives since
1982. NASA, NOAA, the U.S.
Air Force, and the U.S. Coast Guard are working together to eliminate
this search, out of search and rescue to reduce the amount of time
to reach victims in distress.
The reality is, is that there’ve been over twenty seven thousand people saved
by this system, many of which were been done by the GOES satellites.
The GOES weather satellites have the ability to constantly
oversee a large area of the Earth, and send real time
data to users. Every country that can see the GOES satellite is able to pick
up the distress down link. The beacon goes of and sends a
message out to whoever can hear it. A GOES satellite
if it’s in view of the beacon will see it and then it’ll take
that message and just relay it, repeat it back down to the ground.
The EPIRB I had was an older model, and so it did not
encrypt a GPS location into the signal. If the distress
is from an old beacon, which does not transmit its
own location, then the GOES satellites provide an immediate
alert. Then you wait until the POES satellite
flies over and gives you the location. These beacons
can be encoded with GPS location and that’s
been an advancement over the last fifteen years. This allows us to not
only speed up the rescue coordination effort but
the chances of survival for someone in a distressed environment is pretty significant.
Purchasing and registering a beacon was critical in
saving Deniss’ life. That information that’s coming from,
directly from the distress beacon to the satellites is the one key link that we have
to actually find out where something is happening and hopefully
again if the beacon is registered, tell us who
that beacon belongs to. Technology developed by NASA
and operated by NOAA led to a quick coast guard response
and a challenging navy rescue. That diver came
down in there navy, U.S. Navy. He came down into that storm
for me, that is the bravest thing I’ve ever seen
anybody do in my life. The helicopter took me to the deck of the Eisenhower;
I’d been cold and wet for four days, didn’t have any
shoes but I was sure glad to be there. People
take for granted the risks the rescue personnel,
so anything we can do to minimize the area that they have to cover,
the amount of hours they have to fly, is better for them.
A new system called the Distress Alerting Satellite
System or DASS is currently being tested successfully
at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. The
Distress Alerting System will carry a search and rescue
repeater on a complete constellation of satellites.
In the case that the GPS system that means twenty-four satellites
will be lessening for victims all over the surface of
the Earth. With the new system the information that we get will be quicker,
it will be more accurate from the instant that there is a distress
happening out there. Once the system is fully operational the ultimate
goal of eliminating the search out of search and rescue will be accomplished.