Tandem SAR satellite capability for Australia and New Zealand maritime domain awareness feasibility study (Project Takahē)

31 Oct 2025

Background

The Australia-New Zealand Collaborative Space Program is aimed at developing new capabilities and expertise in the space sector through joint research projects in Earth Observation, Space Situational Awareness, and Optical Communications. This Program is a cooperation between the Australian Smart Satellite Cooperative Research Centre (SmartSat CRC) and the New Zealand Space Agency (NZSA).

As one of the first projects under this joint initiative, the Takahē project aimed to develop a joint Australia and New Zealand maritime domain awareness mission, focusing on the advancement of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) technologies. Specifically, the project was a feasibility study into whether a novel tandem SAR satellite concept can be effectively implemented at a cost and timescale relevant for AUS-NZ stakeholders for environmental and security monitoring.

Figure 1: Project Takahē maritime domain of interest

Approach

The Takahē project team was a partnership between New Zealand remote sensing research company, Restore Lab, with Australian entities – Blue Moon Lab and Defence Science and Technology Group (DSTG) – providing SAR expertise, modelling and simulation expertise from Inovor Technologies and Shoal Group, and project management and technology development from SmartSat CRC.

Shoal provided the Systems Engineering capability for the project, implementing a Digital Engineering (DE) approach to drive effective research, ensuring the effective capture of decisions and assumptions made during the study, and providing a digital platform for the rapid development and iteration of the design in future project phases, should they be funded.

Figure 2: Shoal Capability Design Life Cycle framework

The DE framework for the project was built on the Shoal Capability Lifecycle Framework (SCLF), implemented in Cameo Systems Modeler™, within a tailored approach aimed at capturing key technical and stakeholder information to support decision making, while minimising overhead and barriers for the execution of the research and feasibility analysis. Shoal led the stakeholder needs analysis, use case development, “optioneering” workshops, and so on, to effectively define the problem and trade study space for subsequent system design feasibility analysis.

Solution

Shoal, working with the broader Takahē project team, developed, iterated, and captured:

Maritime domain awareness applications for the technology (capability definition)
Potential stakeholders for the various capabilities (stakeholder analysis)
A mapping of stakeholders to the various capabilities to determine the areas with largest commercial potential (needs analysis, problem space definition)
The level of improvement on existing capability required to warrant customer investment or procurement of the technology (measures of effectiveness), and
Options for capability implementation used for further detailed system performance and feasibility analysis (use cases, trade studies).

Outcomes

The Takahē project team determined that it is feasible to develop a tandem small-satellite capability for effective use in an Australia / New Zealand maritime border security context. Through Shoal’s Systems Engineering support, a set of prioritised stakeholders, needs, and missions were identified so that effective trade studies and technology feasibility analysis could be performed.

Figure 3: Takahē mission concept (Image source: Takahē Mission fact sheet, SmartSat CRC)

A Feasibility Report was the final output from the SmartSat CRC partnership, which captured Shoal’s contributions to the project, including:

The narrowing of a wide range of potential applications down to a single focus on a border security maritime domain awareness use case;
A set of measures to indicate what ‘good’ looks like for each use case based on the stakeholder needs; and
A set of system options that constrained the design space to enable the modelling and comparison of the different options.

In September 2025, The New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) and SmartSat announced that the Takahē Mission had attracted Phase B funding from the New Zealand Government. The trans-Tasman collaboration will see the development of the Takahē Mission concept to monitor the Southern Indo-Pacific Ocean from space, enhancing maritime domain awareness.

About Shoal

Shoal is complex systems design company. We use Systems Engineering combined with Modelling, Simulation and Analysis to help our clients define, analyse, decide, optimise, and deliver technology-intensive projects in complex environments across Defence, Space, Transport, Energy and Infrastructure.

More: shoalgroup.com