Inventors’ simple device to save lives at sea

Ella Fasciana’s future is bright, literally. The 24-year-old engineer is a co-founder and lead researcher of Glint by Seascape, developing a novel solution for sea rescues.

Finding people lost at sea can be slow, expensive and often unreliable, particularly across vast and remote ocean regions. Glint’s approach is designed to make those searches faster and more effective.

That solution is a floating, foldable marine radar reflector engineered to be highly visible by synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites, which are increasingly used in search and rescue operations. Known as SAR4SaR (SAR for search and rescue), the product is lightweight, low-cost and portable, with no battery requirement. It can be easily stored on small boats and deployed in an emergency to help searchers locate those lost at sea more quickly.

“It’s a low-tech, almost no-tech solution that folds up to about the size of a pizza box. If you’re lost at sea, you open it up and tie it to your boat, reflecting radar signals back to satellites overhead so your location is visible,” Ella says.

“We want to save lives at sea by making searches more efficient. Our goal would be to have one of our radar reflectors in every single small boat and fishing vessel in the Pacific to start with, and then grow out from there.”

The low cost of the reflectors is key, Ella says, so they can be used by communities like those in the Pacific Islands, where access to expensive equipment like EPIRB locator beacons may be limited. “But even if you do have an EPIRB and it’s broken, you could also have this as a back-up.”

Ella, who recently completed a conjoint Bachelor of Environmental Science and Bachelor of Engineering (Hons) and is about to start her PhD, began working on the Glint SAR4SaR project when a gap in her study timetable left her looking for a project to focus on.

She connected with University of Auckland lecturer and Earth observation scientist Thomas Dowling, who had links with Defence Science and Technology (DST), the scientific arm of the NZ Defence Force. DST was investigating more effective and efficient search and rescue methods and needed an engineer to research and build a prototype.

Two years later, Thomas and Ella are both named on the patent for the reflectors and associated designs, alongside the University of Auckland. Glint by Seascape is now in the middle of a capital raise with the goal of commercialisation. The team continues to work closely with DST, and Ella’s PhD, based on the product’s development, is being funded by the NZ Space Agency, a division of MBIE.

The experience has opened Ella up to a new side of science, as an innovator and founder. That included participating in the 12-week University of Auckland Research to Innovation Hatchery, delivered through the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. She says it was invaluable in exposing her to different perspectives and ways of thinking.

“It was a great way to put your idea in front of somebody who has more commercial experience, as well as just see what other people are working on and how they’re approaching it,” she says. “It was also really useful for getting comfortable with explaining what you're doing in less technical terms, making it less academic and more commercial.”

She says the biggest insight from the Hatchery was the importance of focusing on the problem you’re trying to solve, rather than the solution. “That’s everything when you’re commercialising. You have to really break down the problem.

“But the Hatchery experience was also really reassuring. We did get a lot of people saying this is a great idea.”

For Ella, who grew up in Oregon in the US and moved to Auckland just as Covid hit, the future is wide open. A love of making and designing things, along with a high school Intel grant, led her to science and engineering, but she’s also interested in other disciplines like marketing and graphic design.

“I like the combination of environmental science and engineering. It’s a mix of science being ‘this is how the world works and how things impact each other’, and engineering is how you build something. It’s like two different brains.”

Though her focus remains firmly on Glint and her move into PhD studies around the technology, she is open about her future beyond that.

“I’ll probably find myself more in the middle of manufacturing, but I’m open to other things. My overall life philosophy is to leave it better than you found it. The Glint project is really doing that.”