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(24 June 2013) Following severe flooding in northern India and Nepal, the Indian government activated the ‘International Charter Space and Major Disasters’ on 19 June 2013 at 10:30.

The German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) tasked its radar satellite TerraSAR-X with acquiring images of the affected areas and made these available to the Indian civil protection authorities.

Situation is worse than first thought

“After activation of the Charter, we provide our satellite data as soon as possible, free of charge. We provide crisis relief from space for people in the affected regions,” says Jens Danzeglocke of the DLR Space Administration who, as Charter Secretary, coordinates the German contributions to this international federation of 15 space organisations.

“Our colleagues at the Center for Satellite Based Crisis Information (Zentrum für satellitengestützte Kriseninformation; ZKI) at DLR Oberpfaffenhofen led the re-commanding of the satellite immediately after the emergency call and delivered the data to the Charter’s Project Manager in India as soon as possible,” explains Danzeglocke.

In India, the situation is far worse than first thought. The heavy rains surprised the people in the disaster areas. So far, the floods are known to have killed more than 680 people and thousands are still missing; about ten thousand military personnel have been deployed. The biggest rescue operation in the history of the Indian military is underway. The effects are especially bad in the mountainous state of Uttarakhand, where the Ganges River and its tributaries have flooded. TerraSAR-X has imaged this region over the last few days.

The TerraSAR-X radar satellite has been orbiting Earth since 2007 at an altitude of just over 500 kilometres. It has the advantage of being able to acquire images through cloud cover at a very high resolution – better than 1.5 metres when using what is referred to as ‘spotlight’ mode. In the current case, DLR is providing satellite imagery. Indian experts then process these data and combine them with maps. This allows the support staff to see where villages have been destroyed by floodwaters or mountain valleys have been cut off from the outside world.

German participation in the Charter is made possible by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology (Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Technologie; BMWi) and is jointly implemented by the DLR Space Administration and the DLR German Remote Sensing Data Center (Deutsches Fernerkundungsdatenzentrum; DFD), which is part of ZKI. DLR has been a member of the Charter since 2010 and took over the chairmanship of the international network in April 2013. In 2012, the Charter was activated 40 times and it has been activated 10 times so far this year.

(source: DLR)

(By Peter B. de Selding | Jul. 1, 2013, SpaceNews) PARIS — British small-satellite manufacturer Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. (SSTL), furthering its involvement in Kazakhstan’s nascent space program, on July 1 said it would provide an Earth observation satellite and satellite-platform technologies for future spacecraft following a contract with Ghalam LLP of Kazakhstan. Ghalam is a joint venture of Kazakhstan Garysh Sapary (KGS) and EADS Astrium of Europe, which owns SSTL.

The contract follows the October 2009 agreement between Astrium and the Kazakh government to embark on a broad satellite development effort whose long-term goal is to create an autonomous Kazakh satellite manufacturing capability.

The 2009 agreement, which was signed during a bilateral French-Kazakh summit and valued at 230 million euros ($336 million), calls for Astrium to provide a high-resolution Earth observation satellite to Kazakhstan, and for SSTL to provide a medium-resolution spacecraft. The SSTL and Astrium satellites being built under the 2009 agreement are scheduled for launches in 2014.

In March, the UK Space Agency concluded a memorandum of understanding under which Kazakh personnel would be trained by SSTL through exchanges with KGS. In its July 1 announcement, SSTL said 16 Kazakh engineers have worked in Britain under the previous agreement.

SSTL said the new satellite would include an SSTL-built EarthMapper payload for commercial Earth observation imagery in addition to other payload elements including an on-board computer. A smaller satellite, to carry an instrument for ionospheric research, will be developed by SSTL and Ghalam.

Source SpaceNews

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satellite today

(3 July 2013) The curtain has come down on a superstar of the satellite oceanography world that played the “Great Blue Way” of the world’s ocean for 11-1/2 years.
The successful joint NASA and Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) Jason-1 ocean altimetry satellite was decommissioned this week following the loss of its last remaining transmitter.

Launched Dec. 7, 2001, and designed to last three to five years, Jason-1 helped create a revolutionary 20-plus-year climate data record of global ocean surface topography that began in 1992 with the launch of the NASA/CNES Topex/Poseidon satellite. For more than 53,500 orbits of our planet, Jason-1 precisely mapped sea level, wind speed and wave height for more than 95 percent of Earth’s ice-free ocean every 10 days. The mission provided new insights into ocean circulation, tracked our rising seas and enabled more accurate weather, ocean and climate forecasts.

“Jason-1 has been a resounding scientific, technical and international success,” said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “The mission met all of its requirements, performed an extended mission and demonstrated how a long-term climate data record should be established from successively launched satellites. Since launch, it has charted nearly 1.6 inches (4 centimeters) of rise in global sea levels, a critical measure of climate change and a direct result of global warming. The Jason satellite series provides the most accurate measure of this impact, which is felt all over the globe.”

During parts of its mission, Jason-1 flew in carefully coordinated orbits with both its predecessor Topex/Poseidon and its successor, the Ocean Surface Topography Mission/Jason-2, launched in 2008. These coordinated orbit periods, which lasted about three years each, cross-calibrated the satellites, making possible a 20-plus-year unbroken climate record of sea level change. These coordination periods also doubled data coverage.

Combined with data from the European Space Agency’s Envisat mission, which also measured sea level from space, these data allow scientists to study smaller-scale ocean circulation phenomena, such as coastal tides, ocean eddies, currents and fronts. These small-scale features are thought to be responsible for transporting and mixing heat and other properties, such as nutrients and dissolved carbon dioxide, within the ocean.

“Jason-1 was an exemplary and multi-faceted altimeter mission and contributed so much to so many scientific disciplines,” said Jean-Yves Le Gall, CNES president in Paris. “Not only did Jason-1 extend the precise climate record established by Topex/Poseidon, it made invaluable observations for mesoscale ocean studies on its second, interleaved orbit. Even from its ‘graveyard’ orbit, Jason-1 continued to make unprecedented new observations of the Earth’s gravity field, with precise measurements right till the end.”

The in-orbit Jason-2 mission, operated by the meteorological agencies of the United States and Europe (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and EUMETSAT, respectively) in collaboration with NASA and CNES, is in good health and continues to collect science and operational data. This same U.S./European team is preparing to launch the next satellite in the series, Jason-3, in March 2015.

Contact was lost with the Jason-1 satellite on June 21 when it was out of visibility of ground stations. At the time of the last contact, Jason-1 and its instruments were healthy, with no indications of any alarms or anomalies. Subsequent attempts to re-establish spacecraft communications from U.S. and French ground stations were unsuccessful. Extensive engineering operations undertaken to recover downlink communications also were unsuccessful.

After consultation with the spacecraft and transmitter manufacturers, it was determined a non-recoverable failure with the last remaining transmitter on Jason-1 was the cause of the loss of contact. The spacecraft’s other transmitter experienced a permanent failure in September 2005. There now is no remaining capability to retrieve data from the Jason-1 spacecraft.

On July 1, mission controllers commanded Jason-1 into a safe hold state that reinitialized the satellite. After making several more unsuccessful attempts to locate a signal, mission managers at CNES and NASA decided to proceed with decommissioning Jason-1. The satellite was then commanded to turn off its magnetometer and reaction wheels. Without these attitude control systems, Jason-1 and its solar panels will slowly drift away from pointing at the sun and its batteries will discharge, leaving it totally inert within the next 90 days. The spacecraft will not reenter Earth’s atmosphere for at least 1,000 years.

“Like its predecessor Topex/Poseidon, Jason-1 provided one of the most comprehensive pictures of changes in the tropical Pacific Ocean, including the comings and goings of El Nino and La Nina events,” said Lee-Lueng Fu, Jason-1 project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “These Pacific Ocean climate cycles are responsible for major shifts in sea level, ocean temperatures and rainfall every two to five years and can sometimes be so large that worldwide weather patterns are affected. Jason-1 data have been instrumental in monitoring and predicting these ever-changing cycles.”

In the spring of 2012, based on concern over the limited redundancy of Jason-1’s aging control systems, NASA and CNES moved the satellite into its planned final “graveyard” orbit, depleted its extra fuel and reconfigured the mission to make observations that will improve our knowledge of Earth’s gravity field over the ocean, in addition to delivering its oceanographic data products.

The first full 406-day marine gravity mission was completed on June 17. The resulting data have already led to the discovery of numerous small seamounts, which are underwater mountains that rise above the deep-sea floor. The data also have significantly increased the resolution of Earth’s gravity field over the ocean, while increasing our knowledge of ocean bathymetry, which is the underwater depth of the ocean floor.

JPL manages the U.S. portion of the Jason-1 mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. CNES manages the French portion of the mission.

The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena manages JPL for NASA.

(source: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory)

[Satellite TODAY 06-28-13] As global climate change continues to spark international concern, satellite technology is providing experts with additional tools to better analyze and combat its effects.


“The quality of the imagery has certainly increased,” said Tim Farrar, president, TMF Associates. Farrar said that new satellite sensors, different frequency bands and a decrease in the distance between sampling points are among the reasons for the improved imaging results.

Dan Stohr, president of the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) said he welcomes the new satellite technology and its benefits. “Improved technology and imagery is critical,” he said, noting that “the cutting edge research helps serve a need to better understand climate and severe weather. It’s a question of public safety and a greater knowledge of the environment,” he said.

Although climate change is a hotly contested political issue in the United States, it is recognized and accepted in Europe and throughout much the world, according to Farrar. “In Europe, climate change tends to be more of an accepted science, but in the United States it tends to be more political.”

According to the European Space Agency (ESA), satellites have demonstrated their power in providing far greater precision mapping of the northern hemisphere’s biomass of forests and in assisting with the process of analyzing the Earth’s future climate.

The biomass of the northern hemisphere’s forests has been mapped with greater precision than ever before thanks to satellites, improving the understanding of the carbon cycle and our prediction of Earth’s future climate.
Image credit: ESA
This was part of a statement made by the ESA on climate change, a major focus for the organization.

However, funding for satellite climate change imagery and monitoring systems remains a challenge just about everywhere, noted Farrar. “Satellites are not immune from budget pressure, [they are] just like other government programs,” he said.
Climate change discussions have long been a controversial subject in U.S. politics, typically with Democrats who have traditionally been supportive of additional climate change funding, and use of advanced of satellite technology, according to Trey Hood, professor of political science at the University of Georgia. He said it would not be surprising that the Democratic Obama administration would be supportive of such efforts in the wake of the White House’s recent climate change announcement.

“The carbon pollution that causes climate change isn’t a distant threat, the risk to public health isn’t a hypothetical, and it’s clear we have a moral obligation to act,” David Simas, deputy senior advisor to the White House said in a written statement on June 25.

In response, Republicans have already began organizing U.S. television advertisement campaigns arguing that consumer electric rates will increase as a result of the White House proposal, CNN reported. “The Obama war on coal is killing jobs and raising costs,” a GOP website said.

But according to Simas, the 12 hottest years in the United States on record have all come in the last 15 years. “2012 was the hottest one we’ve ever recorded. When carbon pollutes the air, the risk of asthma attacks increases. When the Earth’s atmosphere fundamentally changes, we see more heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and floods,” Simas said.

Last year, the United States alone saw nearly a dozen significant weather storm systems, each of which cost the country more than $1 billion in damages, according to Simas. As a result, President Obama’s administration has issued a climate change plan based on using satellite technology. Through a series of executive actions, the plan is expected to reduce carbon pollution and prepare the country for the impact of climate change and lead international efforts to address global climate change, all with the help of satellite technology.

On the European front on the war against climate change, European scientists have developed a new method of evaluating data from the Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) to create more accurate pan-boreal maps, according to Astrium. ASAR is an imaging radar instrument which uses microwave radiation to image the surface of the Earth and the oceans.

“The Biomass satellite will deliver, for the first time from space, radar measurements at a wavelength of around 70 cm to delve below the treetops,” an ESA statement said.

In May of 2013, BBC news reported that the Biomass satellite, slated to be launched in 2020 will be able to calcluate the amount of carbon stored in the earth’s forests. And ESA’s Envisat satellite has already given scientists a rare look at map of the entire northern hemisphere’s forest biomass in higher resolution than ever before – each pixel represents 1 km on the ground, according to the agency. “Single Envisat radar images taken at a wavelength of approximately 5 cm cannot provide the sensitivity needed to map the composition of forests with high density,” said Maurizio Santoro a researcher with Gamma Remote Sensing.

Using a new, “hyper-temporal” approach, 70,000 Envisat radar images from October 2009 to February 2011 were used to create a pan-boreal map. “This is the first radar-derived output on biomass for the whole northern zone using a single approach – and it is just one of the products from the Biomasar-II project,” Santoro said.

According to Santoro, combining a large number of radar datasets yields a greater sensitivity and gives more accurate information on what’s below the forest canopy, providing scientists with an insider’s view and additional data to analyze.

The dedicated Biomass satellite was recently selected to become ESA’s seventh Earth Explorer mission. The mission is set to provide an easier and more accurate way to monitor precious resources more regularly. The Biomass satellite will complement the Biomasar’s project results, including tropical regions and will penetrate dense multi-story canopies of rainforests using the Sentinel 1 satellite.

In 2009, an amendment to the Global Monitoring Environment and Security (GMES) agreement authorized the completion of the five initial satellites for the program, and, paved the way to ordering the second units of the Sentinel 1.

Source

(18 March 2013) In its third year, the Copernicus Masters competition – previously known as the GMES Masters – opens once again. Submissions are now being accepted for the first challenge that asks participants to demonstrate how satellites show humans’ impact on our planet.

The Copernicus Masters rewards the best ideas for services, business cases and applications based on satellite Earth observation data. With a prize pool of € 350 000 in cash prizes, technical support, data packages and business incubation, it aims to foster product development and entrepreneurship in Europe.

Initiated in 2011 by ESA, the Bavarian Ministry of Economic Affairs, the DLR German Aerospace Center, Anwendungszentrum Oberpfaffenhofen and T-Systems GmbH, the competition is supported by the European Commission, European Space Imaging GmbH, Astrium GEO-Information Services and the BMW Group.

The international monthly magazine GEO now joins as the competition’s new media partner, seeking the best illustrations based on satellite images under the GEO Illustration Challenge ‘Traces of Humankind’.

Contestants will be asked to illustrate humankind’s footprint on our planet – from past to current developments – in vivid, artistic ways based on satellite imagery.

ESA is teaming up with DLR, European Space Imaging and Astrium GEO-Information Services to provide free satellite data to the contestants of this category.

Submissions for the GEO Illustration Challenge are being accepted from now to the end of June. Submissions to the other eight challenge categories begin in May and June.

For more information, visit the Copernicus Masters website
‘Copernicus’ is the new name for the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) programme.

(March 2013)A satellite platform, ESA’s Sentinel-3, has been reached an important milestone. It has been delivered to Prime Contractor in France and will be installed and made up for a mission to monitor earth.

Once complete, Sentinel-3 will host an array of a state of the art instruments which focuses on the measurement of different aspects of marine environments and land, as well as atmosphere and cryosphere. The first Sentinel-3 satellite is due to be launched in 2014 and in the second half of this year, it will have its array of instruments installed before going through a stringent testing programme in preparation for launch.

Furthermore, within an operationally robust and sustained near-realtime system, Sentinel-3 will provide policymakers and public authorities with the knowledge required to take decisions with confidence, prepare environmental legislation and policies, monitor their implementation and assess their socio-economic impacts and benefits.

Read more at European Space Agency

An official OGC Best Practice document entitled, “OGC EO Product Collection, Service and Sensor Discovery using the CS-WebRIM Catalogue” was adopted by the Open Geospatial Consortium.

This OGC Best Practices Document describes the relations that exist between several metadata conceptual models: Earth Observation (EO) Product, EO Product Collections, Sensors and Services. Specification of the linking between artifacts of these types is important for the process of cataloguing and discovering those artifacts.

During the Heterogeneous Missions Accessibility (HMA) series of projects managed by the European Space Agency (ESA), the HMA stakeholders defined a minimal set of metadata elements that are required to describe a collection of EO products. The stakeholders also defined a minimal set of metadata elements required to describe the different Web service instances that are being deployed throughout the Ground Segments of the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) Contributing Missions.

The OGC EO Product Collection, Service and Sensor Discovery using the CS-W ebRIM Catalogue document is available and free to the public at http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/bp

Read more at OGC

The International Charter “Space and Major Disasters” published the March 2013 issue of their Newsletter, which is available online

The issue highlights among other topics the presentation of the International Charter’s Universal Access initiative during the 2013 session of the Scientific and Technical Subcommittee (STSC) of the Committee on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) organized by UNOOSA.

The Newsletter also touches on issues such as the RADARSAT Constellation, 2012 activation statistics and the December 2012 flooding in the UK.

Read more at International Charter March 2013 Newsletter

During the new Iranian calendar year which started on March 21, Iran plans to launch seven satellites into space, Hamid Fezeli,Head of the Iran Space Agency (ISA) said.

The Nahid, a satellite which is designed by experts at the research centre of ISA with the cooperation of the scientists from Amirkabir University of Technology, is one of the satellites that is scheduled to be launched among the seven.

Other satellites that are scheduled for launching are the Fajr (Dawn), the Zafar (Triumph), and Mesbah. Fajr will be used to facilitate activities related to agriculture, conservation of natural resources and forests, management of natural disasters and other data collection purposes, the ISA chief said.

Read more: Press TV

Source UN-Spider

In April 9th, Meteosat-9 took over the rapid scanning imagery service (RSS) from Meteosat-8.

This completes the reassignment of roles of the three Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) satellites following the launch of Meteosat-10 on 5 July.

After being replaced in January by Meteosat-10 as the prime operational satellite supplying full disk images of Europe and Africa, Meteosat-9 now provides the RSS, delivering more frequent images every five minutes over Europe only. The two-satellite system continues the services previously delivered by Meteosat-8 and -9 in support of weather forecasters in one of their most challenging tasks, nowcasting, which involves detecting and monitoring rapidly developing high impact weather like thunderstorms or fog and issuing related warnings up to 12 hours ahead.

Meanwhile, the residual capabilities of the ageing Meteosat-8 are being assessed to determine how far it can serve as a backup for Meteosat-9 and -10.

Source Eumetsat