Oil exploration remains one of the most risky parts of the petroleum business. Most of the new frontiers of oil exploration are in deep waters, hundreds of miles offshore. Seismic acquisition vessels survey vast ocean areas, collecting data that can be analyzed by geophysicists hoping to locate the most promising drilling locations. A single ship can collect as much as 3 terabytes of raw data every week. Currently, data is collected on magnetic tapes and either flown from the ship or unloaded when the ship docks every few months. From these magnetic tapes, seismic data is transferred to a supercomputer center where sorting, screening, and other processes render it for study by oil company geophysicists. After review, the geophysicists may require additional data to be taken (which starts another long acquisition cycle involving a ship revisit), which may take six months to a year to arrange.

Delivery by satellite has the potential to revolutionize the process as well as the time frames in the collection and analysis of seismic data. The NASA ACTS team joined with the ARIES team to test and demonstrate the power of wideband satellite links, interconnected with multiple terrestrial networks, to preview the information superhighway of tomorrow [81, 82, 83]. ARIES, an acronym for ATM Research and Industrial Enterprise Study, was initiated at Amoco in 1993. The original goal was to build a small ATM, high-speed network with which to study the emerging ATM technology and how such networks could provide a competitive business...