| Within the Marine Recreational Vessel Reconnaissance (MRV Recon) project there exists a need for an application that can predict remote sensing satellite coverages. This is to be used as a planning tool, so that ground truthing of a dynamic scene can occur simultaneously with data acquisition. Having surveyed 64 applications which are currently available, none have met the critical MRV Recon requirements of high temporal resolution, low cost and the capability of manipulating the displayed results. The design and development of such an application, which can meet the requirements was undertaken.; The resulting application is developed in Visual Basic, and is based on ESRI MapObjects. Using NORAD Two-Line Element data files as the source of orbital parameters, an orbital calculation engine is derived from the PREDICT SGP4 algorithm implementation.; Testing has shown that the PREDICT-based application can provide reasonable temporal resolution to the end user, but at a heavy computational cost. Possible imaging events predicted using the application were confirmed using existing image metadata with good results. Future improvements to the currently implemented brute-force algorithms will make the application truly useful to potential user. |
