SeismicStar Service Uses NASA TDRSS to Serve Oil / Gas Exploration Industry

SpaceData International (SDI) and Lockheed Martin, through its Consolidated Space Operations Contract (CSOC), have established a new service called SeismicStar. SeismicStar is an automatic point-to-point turnkey service for the oil and gas industry which uses NASA space and ground assets.

SDI has been conducting a demonstration program with WesternGeco for the past six months transmitting on a daily basis raw seismic exploration data files from a vessel off the coast of Brazil. The data was transmitted over a constellation of NASA communications satellites, to a NASA ground station at White Sands New Mexico and on to an SDI data server. The data is then sent by fiber directly into the WesternGeco processing center in Houston. SeismicStar offers transmission rates of 311 megabits per second. The service, instead of taking months to transport information from remote locations, reduces delivery time to same day access. A typical daily 100-gigabyte file can be transmitted in less than an hour from a disk on the ship to a disk in the processing center.

Currently only NASA offers the capability to provide point-to-point global services via geostationary TDRSS satellites, because of the Ku/Ka-Band transponder bandwidth and unique design of the TDRSS satellites. The TDRSS satellites, via their pointing and tracking capability, can reach virtually anywhere in the world except the extreme North Pole and South Pole areas.

Licensing by commercial users with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for the commercial use of these NASA TDRSS government frequency satellites was necessary. SpaceData has been successful in obtaining licenses from the FCC for the marine seismic exploration application. Under the CSOC contract, Lockheed Martin is authorized to sell available Ku/Ka-Band satellite capacity to commercial customers as long as there is no commercial alternative. Lockheed Martin and SDI have signed a long-term contract for the SDI use of a portion of the available capacity on NASA's Space Network.

Lockheed Martin serves as the prime contractor for CSOC to provide end-to-end space operations Mission and Data Services to both NASA and non-NASA customers. CSOC manages the majority of NASA's data collection, telemetry and communications operations that support Earth-orbiting satellites, planetary exploration, and human space flight activities. Services include data acquisition from spacecraft, data transmission to end-users, data processing and storage, ground and space communications, and mission control center operations. The US$3 billion CSOC contract is managed by Lockheed Martin Space Operations, a business unit of Lockheed Martin Technology Services, Cherry Hill, New Jersey.

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