ESC
Search and Rescue
NASA’s Search and Rescue office has aided the international Cospas-Sarsat Program in the development of search and rescue technologies. In addition to the office’s role in land, sea, and air rescues on Earth, the Search and Rescue office plays a significant role in NASA’s Artemis missions to the Moon.
Search and Rescue
In the United States, search and rescue efforts are coordinated through the national search and rescue program called SARSAT. This is a combined effort between NASA and three other U.S. agencies. The Air Force coordinates inland search and rescue, the Coast Guard coordinates maritime search and rescue, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration operates the system. In their lab at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the Search and Rescue (SAR) office infuses technology into the overall search and rescue program to minimize the search time and maximize rescues on Earth and beyond.
How does NASA contribute to Search and Rescue?
NASA's Search and Rescue office has aided the Cospas-Sarsat Program in the development of search and rescue technologies for over 40 years.
Cospas-Sarsat is a cooperative effort of 44 member countries and organizations dedicated to providing robust and reliable satellite-aided distress location services worldwide. The Search and Rescue office has been integral to designing and testing Cospas-Sarsat's 406 MHz distress beacons, as well as the flight and ground systems that support them. When beacon users find themselves in distress, they can activate their beacons to begin the search and rescue process. Global Navigation Satellite System constellations like GPS and Galileo host Cospas-Sarsat's primary flight segment, which listens for beacon signals. Those signals are relayed to ground stations — known as local user terminals — which use the data to calculate the beacons' locations. The system supplies that data and the computed location to relevant organizations and first responders across the globe.
The Search and Rescue office develops, tests, and troubleshoots both space-based and ground-based search and rescue technology.
The Search and Rescue office investigates new ideas and innovations that could enhance search and rescue operations. The office is responsible for several cutting-edge efforts, including search-and-rescue repeaters for use on Global Navigation Satellite Systems like GPS that significantly reduce the time it takes to locate distress signals. NASA also developed phased-array search and rescue ground station antennas that can track more than 20 spacecraft at once, enhancing rescue capabilities and reducing operation costs, and Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) that can track beacon signals in remote areas like the forests or the open ocean. After review by the international Cospas-Sarsat Program, NASA is passing its second-generation rescue beacons to commercial industry for manufacturing and sale. The production of these upgraded beacons will allow pilots, mariners, and adventures across the globe access to technologies with improved accuracy, quicker response times, and a more robust signal.
Past and future Artemis missions rely on the Search and Rescue office.
On November 16, 2022, NASA launched the historic Artemis I mission to start a new era of lunar exploration. The Search and Rescue team and their newly developed SAR Intelligent Terminal (SAINT) were on the USS Portland Naval ship and tracked the Orion space capsule's location beacons as it returned from its lunar voyage and splashed into the Pacific Ocean. Future Artemis missions to the Moon will be crewed, meaning safety is even more imperative. The first users of the Search and Rescue office's new second-generation beacon technologies will be Artemis astronauts on the Artemis II mission. These miniaturized Advanced Next-Generation Emergency Locator (ANGEL) beacons will be attached to astronauts' life preserver units. When astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hanse splash back down to Earth — or in the unlikely event of a launch abort scenario — these beacons will allow them to be found if they need to egress from the Orion capsule.
The Search and Rescue team is extending Earth search and rescue systems to the Moon.
In summer 2023 and spring 2024, the SAR team supported the Underway Recovery Tests 10 & 11 with the Artemis II astronauts in San Diego, California. There, SAR team members tested Orion's location beacons, ANGEL, and SAINT. They participate in these tests as part of the agency's Exploration Ground System (EGS) team. The Search and Rescue office is also developing exploration capabilities as part of NASA's Lunar Search and Rescue (LunaSAR) concept, extending the best practices of current Earth-based SAR systems to the lunar surface. LunaSAR ties into NASA's LunaNet concept, a flexible and extensible lunar communications and navigation architecture. LunaSAR will extend ANGEL beacon usability from Earth to the lunar surface, enabling rapid response to potential distress situations on the Moon. LunaSAR will use LunaNet and other cislunar comm and nav architectures as a backbone for transmitting rescue data during lunar surface activities.
Search and Rescue professionals monitor NASA <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/commercial/crew/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Commercial Crew Program</a> missions to the International Space Station.
The SpaceX Crew Dragon and Boeing CST-100 Starliner vehicles are both equipped with SAR-developed emergency beacons. These beacons help NASA locate astronauts in the unlikely event of a launch abort scenario or during splashdown upon return from the station. In addition to Commercial Crew Program missions, the Search and Rescue office also monitors beacon-equipped Russian Soyuz vehicles transporting astronauts to the orbiting laboratory from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
The Search and Rescue office actively works to make air travel safer.
The office studies the performance of emergency locator transmitters (ELTs) that are specially designed beacons that activate automatically in the event of an aircraft accident. Their comprehensive study of ELT failures helped develop recommendations for the Federal Aviation Administration, emergency beacon manufacturers, and airframe manufacturers regarding beacon installation and survivability. The office is also utilizing its second-generation beacon technology to develop specifications for a new global, real-time aviation distress-tracking system. This system will use the Cospas-Sarsat network to leave breadcrumbs along a plane's route well before crash-related activation, providing supplemental location data that improves the accuracy of the system and response times.
Cospas-Sarsat
Beacons for land, sea, and air rescue efforts.
Since 1982, when the first official rescue associated with the international program occurred, the Cospas-Sarsat system has provided information assisting in the rescue of more than 50,000 people in more than 13,000 distress situations.
quick facts
Cospas-Sarsat uses three types of emergency beacons depending on whether they are carried by individuals, on board aircraft, or onboard maritime vessels.
There are over 1 million emergency beacons in use worldwide.
Cospas-Sarsat works through three types of satellites: low Earth orbit (LEOSAR), medium Earth orbit (MEOSAR), and high-altitude geosynchronous orbit (GEOSAR).
There are five low Earth orbit search and rescues satellites (LEOSARs), seven geosynchronous orbit satellites (GEOSARs) and more than 35 medium Earth orbit satellites (MEOSARs) in operation.
There are 65 ground stations called local user terminals (LUT’s) tracking LEOSARs, 31 tracking GEOSARs, and 17 tracking MEOSARs.
SARSAT U.S. Rescues Map
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) hosts SARSAT's Search and Rescue Satellite-Aided Tracking map, logging SARSAT U.S. rescues from 2016 to today.
Learn more
Search and Rescue Resources
Space Communications: 7 Things You Need to Know
NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program enables this data exchange, whether it’s with astronauts aboard the International Space Station,…
Read the Story
