🛰 🌏 🏴‍☠️ "You might think that in a time of satellite megaconstellations all of the Earth's surface would be imaged regularly, & if something big happened, we'd see it.

⬛️ Well, you'd be wrong...

🔶️ The truth is that most well-known EO satellites don't image areas of the ocean away from land.

🔶️ It is surprisingly difficult to get an exact answer for 'why' here. I've heard different combinations of power-saving, downlink limitations, & land-optimized instrumentation.

🔶️ It's worth noting here, that I am talking about satellites with a high enough resolution to monitor human activity on the open ocean (eg. vessels), not lower resolution sats that monitor sea state or help with weather forecasting (eg. Sentinel-3).

🔶️ The coverage of major EO satellite platforms used by OSINT researchers, including Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, and Landsat can be seen below.

🔶️ The (non-open-source) PlanetScope constellation of Dove/SuperDove satellites, is also frequently used by OSINT researchers and covers coastal areas, the Mediterranean, Persian Gulf, and South China Sea. Govt. clients may be able to access more areas.

🔶️ Outside of these platforms (and the areas they cover), your only option would be to task a high-resolution optical or SAR satellite to image an area of the ocean at an extremely high cost. Moreover, you would need forewarning about where/when something was about to happen.

🔶️ Notably, the same trade-offs (likely) exist for current generation spy satellites, in that high resolution = narrow field of view, and thus necessitates foreknowledge when combined with the limitations imposed by orbital mechanics.

🔶️ The end result of this is that >50% of the Earth's surface is simply unmonitored in any useful way. A ship with its AIS transponder off, or spoofed, can simply disappear. Illegal cargos can be traded, sanctions can be dodged, and fisheries plundered."

📎 Michael Cruickshank