Texas Toll Road Tries Satellite Sensing for Maintenance

A Texas toll road operator has turned to the sky for solutions to a very down-to-earth problem: roadway maintenance. The State Highway 130 Concession Co. is using satellite technology to monitor a 41-mile southern section of SHI 30--one of the first such uses in the US. The concessionaire for the toll road that stretches between San Antonio and Austin has partnered with E059 to use satellite remote sensing technologies to evaluate roadway conditions with millimeter accuracy and identify problems before they impact safety or ride quality. The key to the approach is interferometric synthetic aperture radar (In-SAR), which creates high-density measurements by using radar signals from Earth-orbiting satellites. InSAR imagery permits the monitoring of data representing a wide area at all times of day or night, in any weather conditions.