The Philippines' New Weapon to Fight Typhoons, Earthquakes and Floods
The Republic of the Philippines has given life to a new national organization. Its president, Rodrigo Duterte, has placed it under his direct authority to act as the main preventive and reactive instrument against the natural disasters that year after year strike an archipelago inhabited by some 110 million people and made up of over 7,100 islands. Named after the English acronym PhilSA, the main raison d'être of the Philippine Space Agency is to use space science and technology to manage and mitigate the disasters that periodically ravage major areas of the country and cause the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, the destruction of countless critical infrastructures and major economic losses.
The above disasters are a consequence of the Philippines' geographical location in the so-called Pacific Ring of Fire and also of its tropical climate, which generates a significant annual number of typhoons, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and major floods. Philippine government agencies are increasingly relying on satellite data, as the relentless forces of nature strike similarly at the largest and most populous of the islands, Luzon - in the north, where the capital Manila is located - as well as Mindanao in the far south and the countless smaller Bisayas.
As an example of the impact of the lethal energies unleashed in the western Pacific where the Philippines is located and the importance of space applications for its inhabitants, the optical and radar images provided by the satellites were used in January 2020 to check the extent of the lava and ash sources thrown up by the eruption of the Taal volcano - 66 kilometres from Manila-, which required the evacuation and assistance of the 45,000 inhabitants of the nearest areas.
The Philippine monitoring stations have direct access to their own satellites and a wide range of data and images from other commercial optical - KompSat-3, RapidEye and Worldwiev-1, 2 and 3 - and radar - KompSat-5, COSMO-SkyMed and NovaSAR-1 - space platforms, which are provided to the provincial Risk Reduction Agencies. In December 2019, they were used to provide assistance to the tens of thousands of people displaced by violent typhoon Kammuri - with winds of 155 km/h and gusts of 235 km/hr - which caused some twenty deaths in the north of the country and forced the closure of Manila's airport. They are also central to the predictions made by the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA), to monitor the status of the Department of Budget and Management projects, and to reflect changes in vegetation that are of interest to the Department of Environment and Natural Resources.
At just one year old, the Philippine Space Agency (PhilSA) was born out of the Philippine Space Act 11363, passed by the nation's Senate and signed by President Rodrigo Duterte in mid-August 2019, after emerging strengthened from the mid-term legislative and municipal elections held in mid-May last year. The Space Law and PhilSA are the result of the combined efforts of the secretary - equivalent to a minister - of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST), Fortunato de la Peña, and the director of the Advanced Science and Technology Institute (ASTI), Joel Joseph Marciano, the latter appointed last January as director general of the Space Agency and direct advisor to President Duterte.
With the support of the President of the Republic, both Fortunato de la Peña and Joel Joseph Marciano have fought hard to overcome the legal obstacles to the PhilSA Foundation. In essence, the obstacles were none other than the resistance of the Philippine space sector itself, which, made up of different government and academic research institutes but belonging to different ministries, lacked adequate direction and coordination, which the new agency is designed to remedy.
The new Agency "is being built from scratch, but it is not starting from scratch," says its Director General. PhilSA takes advantage of the 25 infrastructures, technologies and more than a thousand technicians already working in the space field. Among the main ones is PEDRO, the Philippine Earth Data Observation and Resource Center, a set of receiving stations located in the cities of Manila and Dávao. Equipped with satellite tracking antennas, they receive, process and distribute data and images for application in disaster risk management, environmental monitoring and land and sea surveillance.
PhilSA has also been founded to preserve and enhance national security, foster the emergence of a thriving space industry, and ultimately to accelerate the country's development to become a space-faring nation within this decade. The University of the Philippines-Diliman's University Laboratory for Small Satellites and Space Engineering Systems (ULyS3ES) is a pioneering academic centre for space technology. PhilSA does not yet have a headquarters. But it is now being built in the Clark Special Economic Zone, 40 miles northwest of Manila. This is a huge expanse of land that has been rehabilitated as a commercial area and free port after the United States Air Force left the major military airbase of the same name in 1991.
The Philippines has put two government Earth observation microsatellites into orbit, the so-called Diwata-1 and Diwata-2, and a third one, entirely built in the country, will be in orbit by 2022, according to Fortunato de la Peña. The Diwata-1 and 2 were developed from December 2014 by Philippine engineers with the technological support of the Japanese imperial universities of Tohoku and Hokkaido, which specialise in cooperating with developing countries to develop small space platforms.
Measuring about 50 centimetres in side and with a cubic shape, the 55-kilogram Diwata-1 was released from the Japanese module of the International Space Station in April 2016 and placed at an altitude of 420 kilometres. On April 6 this year, it ended its operational life and burned up during its entry into the Earth's atmosphere. In its four years of service, its high-precision telescope with 3-metre resolution and its two wide-ranging cameras have captured more than 45,000 images of the Earth, observed 38 per cent of Philippine territory and sent more than 17,000 photographs from different parts of the country.
Still in operation and placed at an altitude of 601 kilometres by a Japanese H-IIA launcher, the 57.3 kg Diwata-2 is equipped with improved equipment similar to that of its big brother. It has already generated some 2,400 from the Philippines - and over 1,600 from the rest of the world - which made it possible to monitor Typhoon Vongfong, which hit the country in mid-May and whose heavy rainfall and winds of over 150 km/h - with gusts of up to 185 km/hr - forced the evacuation of 400,000 people from the provinces of Eastern Samar and Northern Samar. Between 1983 and 1992, the Philippine state-owned operator put five platforms into orbit, called Palapa, as part of commercial communications. They were manufactured by American companies and also launched into space from the United States. They are now out of service.
A space agency dedicated to reaping the benefits of outer space has been a dream of successive Philippine governments for several decades. It has been President Rodrigo Duterte who has taken the necessary steps to establish a "coherent and unified strategy" to achieve the development and use of space in order to "keep up with other Southeast Asian nations in terms of space science and technology", says the Philippine Space Act.