Saving Lives with 24/7 Search and Rescue Support
ERT delivers secure, real-time distress alerts, ensures data integrity, provides IT security, and applies expert engineering to keep the SARSAT system mission-ready. This program saves lives through 24/7/365 operations in coordination with the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Coast Guard, NASA, and NOAA.
Case Study
Saving Lives with 24/7 Search & Rescue Support
ERT safeguards American lives by managing the U.S. Coast Guard’s SARSAT system to deliver secure, reliable, real-time distress alerts to the U.S. Air Force, Coast Guard, NASA, and other search and rescue partners.
American Interests,
By the Numbers
411
Individual lives saved by SARSAT efforts in 2024 alone
99.5 %
Uptime availability rates across all ground station nodes and data relay components
4
Phased array MEOLUT placed in operations in 2024 – Florida, Guam, Hawaii, and New Mexico
Our Solution
The Search and Rescue Satellite-Aided Tracking (SARSAT) system, relays real-time distress signals and alerts through a constellation of LEO, GEO, and MEO (LGM) satellites and ground systems from emergency beacons carried by aviators, mariners, and land-based users to search and rescue (SAR) services. The four multi-department agencies involved in the U.S. portion of SARSAT include the Air Force, Coast Guard, NOAA, and NASA.
ERT provides operations, systems engineering, security, system administration, software engineering and development, and end user support.
Our Approach
ERT ensures data integrity; performs trend analyses; provides IT security controls, continuous monitoring, and security testing/evaluation; and incorporates tested/validated products.
ERT participates in NOAA Enterprise Architecture planning groups and proactively plans and transitions to available enterprise tools and services in close coordination with the NOAA customer. SARSAT is often used as the model system within NESDIS because it is usually the first high-impact system to implement new enterprise offerings.
Results
Security Systems Support
First high-impact system in NESDIS to adopt NOAA’s ArcSight, HSPD-12, and Security Center capabilities. The OSPO-wide implementation of Tripwire Enterprise and Tripwire Log Center was modeled after our deployment on SARSAT.
Server Virtualization
In support of SARSAT system modernization, ERT planned and executed a server virtualization using VMware that increased system availability by reducing single points of failure. The modernized SARSAT system mitigates risks of hardware component failure posed to operation and provides a robust fault tolerance solution.
The system has shown significant cost savings in procurement with a 63% reduction in physical servers; in a power and cooling reduction of $25K annually; in datacenter consolidation from eight racks to three; and in enterprise management tooling by reducing server deployment from 48 to 2 hours. The system achieves NOAA’s enterprise management mandate with commonality of platforms across development, testing, production, promotion, and rollback capabilities.
Modernization of Software Inventory
We addressed many shortcomings, such as excessively verbose but unverified documentation, undocumented software changes, multiple versions of baseline executables, and missing source files of legacy USMCC build and deployment processes. We integrated Microsoft Visual Studio with OSS tools such as Git and WiX to manage the complexity of building and deploying disparate software products.
We consolidated all deployable artifacts, starting with all source code, including configuration items such as Windows registry, scheduled tasks, database deep space network, and batch scripts, etc., into SCM baseline.
After collecting all deployable artifacts, we established automated dependency rules which forced source code to be built first, and then executables were extracted from the build process into native Windows installers and tagged with metadata, such as version, date, authors, and digital signature.
By leveraging native windows installers and enforcing dependency management, we instituted transactional and reversible deployment processes with audit controls automatically enabled. This work reduced our software modules from 159 down to 86, a 46% reduction with NO LOSS of function or availability. It automated much of the build and deployment activities to eliminate tedious and error prone manual steps, reducing operation deployment from days to merely hours and ensured consistent deployment across multiple NOAA sites.
Technical Delivery
Successfully completed the CISA High Value Asset (HVA) assessment of SARSAT, which included a detailed architectural review, technical exchange, and penetration test.
Led the coordination, implementation, and successful transition of both AFRCC and AKRCC from legacy communications to RESTful API-based data delivery for their Mission Management Tool (MMT), enabling faster, more reliable, and scalable information exchange.
This modernization improved data integrity, reduced latency, and strengthened operational communications between the RCCs and the USMCC. Early coordination and implementation without the signed ISA allowed both groups to train their controllers in the new operational system while having the legacy AFTN data feed also running operationally.
Development of the SARSAT Monitoring and Reporting Tool (SMART) Dashboard
Provide for real-time performance monitoring, allowing for predictive maintenance and early anomaly detection to better tease out system issues before they occur.
