06 May 2022
28 May 2020
As part of the Cospas-Sarsat programme it relays distress signals from 406 MHz beacons within the MSG coverage zone in Europe, Africa and the Atlantic Ocean.
The signals are sent to Geostationary Earth Orbit Local User Terminals (GEOLUTs) and eventually passed on to Rescue Coordination Centres (RCC) for quick organisation of rescue activities.
Geostationary satellites, such as MSG, continually view large areas of the Earth and can provide near instantaneous alerting from a 406MHz beacon. However, they cannot determine a beacon's location using Doppler shift processing ideally, a LEOSAR or Sarsat satellite (a specially-equipped polar-orbiting satellite) will fly over the the beacon within the next hour and calculate the beacon's location.
