National Defence committee  Thank you for raising that because that's an important point. I was talking about our ability to detect signals and what that might mean for somebody who was transmitting and stopped transmitting. The intention of the Canadian government is actually to fuse this information set

National Defence committee  We have a very good idea of that. It's interesting. I talked about a series of constellations and those series of constellations providing different functionalities that meet national needs. The first one is the most expensive, because as well as paying for the spacecraft, you ac

National Defence committee  It takes about three years to do that.

National Defence committee  You wouldn't pick up information on submarines. There are something like 80,000 ships today that have these transmitters on board, and the number will increase over time as the requirements change. For submarines, you take a different approach. I did talk about a series of cons

National Defence committee  They can, actually. They're mandated to carry those things. They're signatories to the IMO, which requires them to do it. With respect to information and tracking, if a ship is transmitting its signal as it's supposed to, and then it turns it off, interestingly enough it becomes

National Defence committee  I don't claim to be an expert on climate science, but I've listened to Dr. Steve MacLean, who is the president of the Canadian Space Agency. He says it's very important to have accurate weather models for climate change to understand what's going on. The dilemma is that those mod

National Defence committee  At the moment we've built a demonstration satellite that is flying. That information is being used today by the Canadian Department of National Defence to do evaluations and compare it with other sources of maritime surveillance data. They are very pleased with it. The intention

National Defence committee  Today I'm just talking about one type of satellite, which is a satellite that's gathering regular frequency signals from ships. In truth, the Canadian Space Agency long-term space plan that I alluded to earlier actually talks about a series of microsatellite constellations that

National Defence committee  Yes, there is some latency there, but it's very short. In the picture I showed you there are some ground stations. They're in the far north of Canada and also in the south. In fact, we're negotiating at the moment to put one down in the Antarctic. What happens is that as the sp

National Defence committee  It's very interesting, actually, because it's global coverage. Today we're talking about Arctic sovereignty and our concern to understand what's happening there. But Canada has a great interest in everything. We're interested in what's happening off our coasts in terms of monitor

National Defence committee  It's very simple. In the worst case, it would be one and a half hours.

National Defence committee  Worst case.

National Defence committee  That's at the equator, because that's where there's the most space. As this thing goes around, there's more room at the equator. Therefore, it goes there less frequently. As you go further north, you see it more frequently, every hour or every half hour or so. And with ships trav

National Defence committee  That's right, because traditionally what happens is that most spacecraft are in something called a geosynchronous arc. If you imagine the earth is spinning on its axis here, if you put a satellite 36,000 kilometres in space, it rotates at the same speed that the earth rotates, so

National Defence committee  In this particular example, this constellation requires six polar-orbiting satellites. The earth is rotating; the satellites are going over the North Pole and the South Pole, and the earth is spinning underneath. So in a period of time, this one satellite will actually look at ev