Recently in Earth Science Category

"ESA's Proba-V microsatellite is now assembled and midway through testing to ensure it is fully spaceworthy. The miniature Earth-observer, designed to chart global vegetation every two days, will be launched in April. The testing at the specialised Intespace facility in Toulouse, France, includes rigorous simulations of Proba-V's take-off conditions and the hard vacuum and temperature extremes it must endure in orbit. It comes after Proba-V's assembly was completed by prime contractor QinetiQ Space at its facility in Kruibeke, Belgium last month. Building it was a complex operation. Although smaller than a cubic metre, the satellites carries a wide-angle telescope for its main Earth-monitoring instrument, a pair of radiation sensors, a fibre optic connector experiment, a prototype radio transmitter based on the semiconductor gallium nitride, and a test receiver to track aircraft in flight all around the globe." More

"Technology is creating a new breed of scientist. I'm talking about citizen scientists - ordinary people and volunteers from all walks of life coming together to help monitor, and possibly mitigate, the next big earthquake through an innovative program called NetQuakes. A play off the popular company Netflix - a movie company that allows users to rent movies through the mail - NetQuakes allows ordinary people to volunteer as a kind of host "family" for one of the program's many blue seismometers. This grassroots movement, an innovative effort between the USGS, the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network (PNSN) and regular people, is forming an intricately advanced network of data that could help scientists, emergency experts and the general public become more aware of the dangers involved with earthquakes." More

"DigitalGlobe (DGI), a leading global provider of high-resolution earth imagery solutions, today announced an agreement with the Enough Project to continue providing unrivaled imagery and analysis services to monitor evidence of bombings, razed villages and possible threats to civilians in Sudan in an effort called the Satellite Sentinel Project (SSP). In addition to the imagery and analysis provided under the terms of this new agreement, DigitalGlobe will also contribute additional in-kind services." More

"Imagine a fully-instrumented satellite the size of a half-gallon milk carton. Then imagine that milk carton whirling in space, catching never-before-seen glimpses of processes thought to be linked to lightning. The little satellite that could is a CubeSat called Firefly, and it's on a countdown to launch next year. CubeSats, named for the roughly four-inch-cubed dimensions of their basic building elements, are stacked with modern, smartphone-like electronics and tiny scientific instruments. Built mainly by students and hitching rides into orbit on NASA and U.S. Department of Defense launch vehicles, the small, low-cost satellites recently have been making history. Many herald their successes as a space revolution."

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GMES Masters competition 2012

"Following its debut in 2011, the GMES Masters competition is open once again. As one of seven challenges in Europe's innovation competition for Earth observation, the Agency is staging the ESA App Challenge with a prize worth E 60 000. The GMES Masters competition awards prizes for the best projects and business ideas involving commercial Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) applications. Its purpose is to support the development of market-oriented applications that use data from the programme. This year's App challenge will give the entrant behind the most innovative smartphone App, based on the use of GMES data, the opportunity to begin an incubation programme to the value of O60 000 at one of the six ESA Business Incubation Centres in Europe."

CryoSatApp: Ice Data at Your Fingertips, ESA

"Discover ESA's ice mission, track it in real time and obtain the latest measurements with the new CryoSat application. CryoSat is measuring the thickness of polar sea ice and monitoring changes in the ice sheets that blanket Greenland and Antarctica. The CryoSat iPhone and iPad application - or CryoSatApp - is now available at Apple's App Store. "

Planet Earth in your pocket ... and on your tablet

"ESA has updated its application for iPhone and iPad. With the launch of the ESA App V2, users can see ESA's latest satellite imagery from Envisat in near-real time, complementing the latest news and discoveries in space exploration and Earth observation. Making full use of the iPhone and iPad touch features, ESA App V2 puts videos, images, facts and figures, ESA's Twitter feeds, YouTube links and other information in a convenient mobile package. The ten latest satellite images of our planet are also now at your fingertips. One of the newest features is the automatic update of satellite images from ESA's MIRAVI website, which generates acquisitions in near-real time from the world's largest Earth observation satellite, Envisat."

NASA Request for Information (RFI) - Future Space Validation of Earth Science Technologies

"ESTO is funding several CubeSat-based technology validations as part of a pathfinder process. ESTO is now interested in defining the parameters of a possible future competitive program to space validate selected Earth science technologies. That future program is the focus of this RFI. The program may consist of one or two parts. The first part would be a continuation of the current CubeSat-based validations or validation using suborbital reusable launch vehicles (sRLV). The second part would be a somewhat more robust program, expanding the class of possible technologies to validate. NASA is issuing this RFI to seek the high-level details of various projects which might fit in either one or the other of these classes."

SPACE brings Project 'Paridhi' on Equinox Day

"Starting on 23rd September on the Autumnal Equinox Day, Project 'Paridhi' initially will span across all the Asian countries in this Equinox. There will be a participation from India, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, China and Russia. The observation base will be extended to the whole globe by Winter Solstice in December 2011. This project is a showcase for proving that science can be best learnt by doing. On this day, SPACE has invited school students to witness the Autumn Equinox as it is one of the best occasions for all of us to celebrate this wonderful phenomenon using the ancient instruments at Jantar Mantar."

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center ("GSFC") is looking to enter into a non-funded Space Act Agreement partnership for the development of a climate simulation system referred to hereafter as the "Climate@Home(TM) project." The Climate@Home(TM) project will build a virtual climate simulation supercomputer with contributions from citizens for both their idle computing cycles and local knowledge about climate change. The Climate@Home(TM) effort will be a major step towards developing a new quantitative system for prioritizing and designing a climate simulation system. It will spur a closer relationship between the climate science hypothesis (a climate model) and the design of the simulation system used to test that hypothesis. Additionally, it will allow for prior assessment of measurements against specific accuracy, coverage and biases we will be able to constrain within model parameterizations. The Climate@Home(TM) project will also contribute to the national and international effort to better understand climate change, prepare citizens for climate change, and support regional to global climate related policy and decision making. More

NASA will launch a Virginia Tech University experiment to measure nitric oxide in the upper atmosphere this winter from the Poker Flat Research Range in Alaska. The Polar Night Nitric Oxide experiment will be launched on a suborbital flight aboard a NASA Black Brant IX sounding rocket. The launch is scheduled for no earlier than January 30. Scott Bailey, assistant professor in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech, is leading the experiment called "Polar NOx." The experiment is designed to measure the intensity of nitric oxide in the mesosphere and lower thermosphere in the polar region.

A Space Act Agreement signed between NASA's Remote Sensing Earth Science Teacher Program (RSESTeP) and the Academy of Model Aeronautics (AMA) will allow certified Earth science teachers nationwide to continue to bring NASA Remote Sensing resources into their classrooms.

RSESTeP, located at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, provides science teachers the opportunity to expose students in 4th through 12th grades to NASA cutting edge resources and technologies. Members of the AMA can now partner with local schools to fly NASA remote sensing payloads, collecting Earth science data needed to complete classroom projects.