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Tailings Dam

Tailings dams at mining sites can fail catastrophically if ground displacement exceeds safe limits. Traditional InSAR monitoring requires ground processing with days of latency.

Sensor: SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar).

Pipeline:

  • Collect: SAR strip over the dam AOI.
  • Map: interferometric phase subtraction against a stored master image (differential InSAR). For each pixel, compute displacement: Δd=Δϕ⋅λ4π\Delta d = \frac{\Delta \phi \cdot \lambda}{4 \pi}
  • Reduce: count pixels where ∣Δd∣>|\Delta d| > threshold (e.g. 5 mm). If count exceeds minimum cluster size, generate alert with centroid coordinates, max displacement, and affected area.

Alert payload: ~2 KB (AOI ID, timestamp, centroid lat/lon, max displacement mm, pixel count, confidence score).

Feasibility:

  • Differential InSAR phase subtraction is computationally simple (complex multiply + angle extraction per pixel).
  • The master image (~2 GB compressed SLC) must be stored onboard — feasible with modern flash storage.
  • Atmospheric phase screen correction is the hard part; a simplified threshold-based approach (flag only large displacements) avoids needing full atmospheric modeling.
  • Repeat-pass interval depends on orbit: ~daily for a large constellation, weekly for smaller ones.