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"L'Astrolabe" expedition through the Northeast Passage
As
the first civilian foreign ship since the Maud expedition in 1918-20 the French
polar vessel "L'Astrolabe" was allowed to transect the Northern Sea
Route in August 1991. The purpose of the voyage was to reopen the sea route
for international ship traffic and to gain experience about navigation along
the sea route for future merchant ship traffic. The expedition was organized
by Mers Magnetique, a French association for conserving the ecology in the Arctic.
The major problem preventing regular shipping through the Northern Sea Route is the cold climate with large areas of ice-covered seas. Even during the minimum ice extension in late summer/fall, parts of the Northern Sea Route is covered by sea ice.
The expedition of "L'Astrolabe" coincided with the acquisition of
the first detailed SAR ice images from the ERS-1 satellite. This ERS-1 SAR image
was obtained on 16-8-1991, a month after the launch and was sent to the "L'Astrolabe"
in near real time for use in ice navigation. The full image covers 100 by 100
km of the sailing route west of Vilkitskogo Strait with a pixel size of 100
m (click here to see the location
of the SAR image).
The enlarged subimage covers
about 10 x 15 km of the sailing route. The icebreaker track as well as ice floes
and some small islands are shown in the image.
The SAR ice routing project was set up jointly by NERSC, Mers Magnetique, ESA,
Norwegian Space Center and the Alaska Sar Facility (ASF). The purpose of the
project was to demonstrate that ERS-1 SAR images, transmitted to icebreakers
in near realtime, could be useful for navigation in sea ice. This project was
the first in a series of demonstrations where ERS-1 SAR data were used for ice
monitoring in the Kara Sea region.
NERSC, Bergen, Norway
Keywords: ESA European Space Agency - Agence spatiale europeenne, observation de la terre, earth observation, satellite remote sensing, teledetection, geophysique, altimetrie, radar, chimique atmospherique, geophysics, altimetry, radar, atmospheric chemistry