Heavenly Help to the Rescue

A Soviet satellite ushers in an era of extraterrestrial aid

When a small plane carrying three men disappeared over the wilds of northeastern British Columbia last month, Canadian officials despaired of rescuing them. The area is so rugged that, short of heavenly help, finding them quickly seemed impossible. Yet through a miracle of the space age, the help came. On its regular sweep over western Canada, a Soviet satellite, equipped with special electronic "ears" to hear the beeps of small planes or ships in distress, picked up the downed aircraft's automatic emergency beacon and relayed the signals to an antenna outside Ottawa. There a computer quickly used them to obtain a navigational "fix" on the crash site. Within hours, a helicopter plucked the three men out of the wilderness, injured but alive.

The speedy rescue was the first real-life test of a new breed of satellites called SARSATS (for search and rescue satellites) that will be circling the planet in years to come. Carrying special receivers tuned to standard international distress frequencies, these electronic watchdogs will be able to locate troubled craft equipped with inexpensive beacons almost anywhere on earth. Beaming their information back to the ground through a network of dish-shaped antennas, they should ensure prompt rescues of, say, a junk in the South China Sea or a yachtsman rounding the Horn singlehanded.

The hero of the Canadian episode was a Soviet satellite named, in Moscow's prosaic nomenclature, Cosmos 1,383. Launched last June, it was the first spacecraft in the Soviet COSPAS (an acronym for cooperation in space) series. Under discussion since 1975, when Soviet-American cooperation in space was at its apogee with the Apollo-Soyuz linkup, the SARSAT idea is virtually the last of the joint programs that have survived the current chill between Washington and Moscow. One reason: it requires no transfers of hardware or technology. The only tools the satellites have in common is their electronic "language": they must all be tuned to the standard international radio frequencies for distress calls (121.5 and 243 megahertz). Though the U.S. and Canada tested such electronics on earlier American satellites, the first true U.S. SARSAT will not become operational until next February, when the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's latest Tiros weather satellite goes into orbit.

For the Soviets, the Canadian rescue erases some of the ill will generated in 1978 when a falling Soviet satellite scattered radioactive materials over a wide area of the Northwest Territories. It also gives Moscow another space first on the eve of the 25th anniversary of the launch of the world's first artificial satellite, Sputnik I, on Oct. 4, 1957. Above all, it proves that a satellite several hundred miles above the earth can pick up a signal as weak as that of the single-engine plane. Said one of the rescued men, George Heemskeerk of Brampton, Ont.: "We should have been cooperating like this years ago. This is something that can save people's lives." Heemskeerk and his companions went down while they themselves were looking for a plane that vanished July 19, only two weeks before the Soviet satellite began working. The pilot was Heemskeerk's son Jim, 24, who is still missing with a passenger.

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