The positioning of their AVStar satellite will be at, or near, 130o East Longitude (as shown) and will provide 24-hour continuous coverage of the region from India to the mid Pacific (west of Hawaii).

Australia and other countries in the Asia Pacific are currently dependent for weather observations on one 11-years-old, partially disabled US geostationary imaging satellite with obsolete instrumentation, operated on lease from the American National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Called GOES-9 (GOES stands for Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite), it has only a limited remaining life. Sudden failure of GOES-9 would place the region in a precarious position, affecting a wide range of industries and economies.

A geostationary satellite, which orbits at the same speed as the Earth's rotation, can provide continuous coverage, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, from a fixed location high above the Earth, allowing cloud weather patterns and cyclones to be monitored continuously.

Movements of ships, ocean temperatures, volcanic ash emissions, growth of pastures and locations of lightning strikes causing bushfires, are among the many observations that would be greatly enhanced through AstroVision's new GEO satellite.

AstroVision chose Australia as its headquarters because of an obvious gap in modern geostationary satellite coverage for the Asia-Pacific.

The AstroVision 24 hour satellite coverage will be distinct from, and complementary to, that offered by rapidly-orbiting Low Earth Orbit imaging satellites, which give coverage for, at best, 15 minutes at a time, once a day, before disappearing over the horizon.

"The beauty of our idea, says Michael Hewins, Managing Director of AstroVision Australia, "was taking this stuff- that was already designed and developed to be used to study other planets- and then putting it into a configuration that could be used to observe Earth. We have patents on the use of these advanced sensors, and their configuration for imaging at 500 metres or better, from GEO."

"The first satellite will probably be launched in 2008 (on an Ariane rocket, from French Guiana), and the second one will probably be launched in early 2009, and then we'll launch them on six-month cycles", says Hewins.

"We could be a secondary payload for Ariane, being only one thousand one hundred kilograms when loaded with fuel. We've reduced everything � if you look at the planetary missions, part of the issue was getting out of earth's gravity well; so engineers had to build spacecraft that were fuel efficient, low in mass, radiation hardened, smaller and more structuralized, which is what we're building". The seven instruments that will fly on AstroVision's AVStar satellite include: firstly, a wide field camera providing a shot of the entire Asia Pacific hemisphere, able to track large phenomenon like super typhoons.

Cameras two and three are steerable narrow-field cameras able to cover thousand kilometre blocks for closer looks. The true colour video, at one frame a second, can track localized weather, scan objects of interest, like ships in distress, detect bushfires, or monitor illegal fishing.

Camera four is a multi-spectral camera that registers ten specific frequencies in the spectral band, from infrared right through to ultraviolet. Two spectral bands, in particular, that discriminate between water vapour and volcanic ash will be used as a real time volcanic ash detection system for airliners.

Camera five, a thermal infrared camera, covers seven individual infrared channels, able to detect fire and volcano activity, with a 250 metres resolution within a thousand kilometre scanning frame. It could be used by power distribution utilities for load balancing over areas with varying surrounding temperature, used by commodity traders for crop prediction or by farmers for assessing effects of draught.

Camera six, a low-light camera, can pick up bright spots, such as lights from boats fishing illegally at night, strobe lights of airliners at night, or new fires.

The seventh unit, a lightning- mapping sensor, picks up the electro-magnetic transients that signal a lightning flash. Emergency services agencies and fire-fighting authorities could pick up the lightning flashes, which cause about half of all bushfires. Power transmission authorities could also pinpoint lightning strikes damaging long-distance power transmission lines.

The lightning sensor was originally developed, and used, for the Galileo probe to monitor lightning on Jupiter, and some of its moons, with their electrically charged atmospheres.

"The satellites are designed to move 110 degrees twice in their lifetime - assuming by the third satellite we'll go from from 250 to 125 metres resolution, Hewins says.

"When we launch the third satellite, we'll move it into the first slot again, as this is the most defined and most successful market, and we'll take the first satellite - that's already in orbit - and move it into another market (like the Middle East, or Europe) that has only begun to adopt the technologies that will benefit from our services".

While their live data will be of value to a wide range of markets, AstroVision is initially targeting four main commercial segments: 3G mobile phones, broadcast media, broadband Internet, and maritime weather.

AstroVision says there are over 40 million current 3G subscribers in its satellite's planned footprint, and market researchers, they say, have forecast over 400 million 3G customers by the time their satellite is launched. While networks are busy upgrading their infrastructure to 3G, AstroVision says it'll well poised to roll out their new applications.

Numerous countries in the Asia-Pacific have some form of "weather channel" on their cable or satellite television networks, but there is currently no regional provider of 24-hour live weather information.

AstroVision intends to help establish the first ever 24-hour live regional and local weather service for the entire Asia-Pacific region, called "WeatherMaxx".

Broadband internet users will be able to subscribe to a real-time stream of HDTV quality, low light, and thermal imagery for the Asia Pacific region, delivered over the Web as a series of images streamed on a regular basis.

Users will be able to toggle between a regional view of clouds in motion, watch cyclones and typhoons travel across the Pacific, or zoom in to major urban areas to view current local weather conditions.

Its maritime weather service will be able to display a 200-500 nautical mile area around a user's vessel (be it big or small), and provide surface temperature mapping capability, too, for a slightly higher fee.

AstroVision's real-time maritime weather application will use a combination of data feeds from their AVStar Wide Field and Narrow Field Cameras, with high-speed streams sampled at a rate of 1 frame/2 minutes, processed and encoded to a GPS grid, and rebroadcast across the footprint of the satellite by a leased commercial C-band transponder to ships in the region.

AstroVision will also provide safety/emergency-related services to government customers, like real time bush fire alerts (by combining data streams from their visual, thermal infrared, lightning mapper, and low light camera systems, a computer will continually monitor, multiple times each minute, for the first instance of visible smoke, temperature increase, or brightness (at night) which are indicators of a new fire. The system will automatically notify the designated fire service offices of the precise GPS coordinates of the fire, allowing for fast response before a fire rages out of control), hail storm warnings, major storm tracking, flood warnings, heat waves, and tsunami detection; as well as defence services, such as coastal monitoring, regional surveillance, and ship and air traffic detection.

"One of the things we're collectively used to, when getting information about the weather and environment, is expecting the weather forecasters to be wrong, expecting the information to be spotty; the problem with this is that we're not surprised when things are wrong � and its not because the guys doing it aren't gifted and experienced � they just don't have enough information", says AstroVision's Managing Director Michael Hewins.

"If you go to a resort in Hawaii- Hawaii has showers all the time- and you're sitting in Waikiki, and if you have all our stuff, then you can actually see that all day, its going to rain in Waikiki, but on the north side of the island, if I drive around, its beautiful- I don't have to guess anymore. And that's the difference".

"If I call up Digital Globe and say I want a picture of Sydney, it'll cost me about a thousand bucks � for just a one off still. But we've taken the idea of imaging, and created almost a software model. I could take the same images coming off our satellites and sell them to you, who with a 3G phone, being a golfer, wants to know what's happening in your area, or I could send it to a television channel, who could show the new cyclones with the same imagery."

"They did DirecTV, and then Sirius and XM Radio, and this is kind of the next step � imaging for the people", Hewins adds.

"When we started our business, and I told people about our new service, they'd often say, "Well, I get it real time, already". In the United States, on TV, they say they're going to give it to you in real time, but their definition of real time is, "When the imagery becomes available to me, I'll give it you", Hewins smiles.

AstroVision's live imaging service is set to transform the insurance industry, by reducing risk, by changing the way people people make claims, and the subsequent premium base offered by insurance companies. "If, as an insurance company, I can see the weather live, and I have the ability to warn people, and suppose I insure your house or car, I can see hailstorms, or I know the exact path of a hurricane, I can build my premium base, based on exactly those things".

Rapid intensifiers- consisting mainly of tornados and hail storms - only make up ten percent of all storms, but are responsible for ninety percent of storm damage. They come up, and move quickly, and as there's nothing presently viewing them live, by the time they're detected, its usually too late for people to get their stock or goods out of the way. Hewins says that when his AVStar satellites are in place, there will be as much as an hour and a half to prepare for such things. "Hurricanes don't go in a straight line, but zig�zag. Right now authorities try to predict where they're going to come ashore, but if you're watching it live, you'll have a better idea where to evacuate, and evacuation costs will be substantially reduced because you can more accurately pinpoint the effected area", says Hewins.

"Our service will also greatly help insurers with post damage assessment, because they'll actually be able to see claims being made for crop damage deep in the Australian outback, for example, after a storm. Presently, you may not know what the weather did, but with our system, you can see exactly what was hit." And for the person paying for coverage, "it may help you reduce your premiums by having the ability to manage possible damage from bushfires better. This ability will in turn help the insurance companies monitor their own premiums much more efficiently".

"Insurance companies could probably develop a system where you get the information (perhaps by SMS), and you accept the ability to get a warning, and you probably get a deduction in the premium � this would be particularly appealing for boat owners and ships on the high seas, that want to avoid bad weather."

The AVStar satellites could also provide terrific new entertainment: "Every third day, a meteor hits the atmosphere and explodes, it's a kiloton yield event, basically a nuclear explosion, and we could broadcast that, because we'll be above the atmosphere; or rocket launches coming off the planet; had we had the satellites up before the new millennium, as the earth turned, as midnight came around, you could have seen fireworks all down the line, with our satellites; we could have filmed Mir being de-orbited, as it burned out; and wouldn't it be great to broadcast the Mars manned landing live? � these things, while not mainline, could all be offered as entertainment", Hewins says.

"We could make an IMAX film at the end of each year showing a year in the life of Earth. You could boil it down into a spun up film of things that happened � the development of storms, for example. We would transform the nature of the film industry, as images of earth would no longer be stitched together, no longer computer generated. And if you put two of our satellites within thirty degrees (of each other) you could have stereoscopic imaging, or 3-D."

The instruments on AstroVision's satellites are not focused on pure science (like those, say, on NOAA's GOES-series birds) to study earth's climate, yet, over several years, Hewins says, will inevitably help to identify patterns, and show how systems work, providing more factual data for climate research.

"We actually approached NOAA and said to them, "...We're not trying to duplicate what you're doing here. We're never going to do the scientific instrumentation (you do) because it's not commercial. Rather, what we're looking to do is have the pretty pictures. But NOAA's operational model is not driven by people's need to get this (type of) information all the time, but by research, and safety against severe disasters, and climate," Hewins says.

"NOAA has legacy contracts in place, or budgetary processes, where they plan for one to fifteen, or twenty years out, and it takes them a long time to turn their big ship around. Their system works, but its just not the most efficient way to do things, because their planning cycles are so long".

"My sense is that once our satellites are up, though, they'll be a reaction by the US government that they should now take on the possibility of using sensors on their satellites... or they'll realize that what they should be doing is buying services and not hardware. Instead of spending billions on building hardware that's essentially 30 years old, they should pay for services, and keep upgrading them, like software from Microsoft, for example. So we'd give you a box, and we would build models based on it, and if you needed an upgrade, we'd give you one".

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