Last Friday, the United Launch Alliance (ULA) successfully launched a Boeing-built satellite into orbit as part of the U.S. Air Force’s Global Positioning System (GPS).
This $131 million satellite was the final addition to the Air Force’s most recent 12-satellite GPS series, known as the Block IIF satellites.
GPS satellites are operated by the Air Force and provide global positioning, navigation and timing services both for the military and civilian users.
We can all access GPS from our phones because of this very constellation.
Back in 1978, the first GPS satellite was launched into orbit.
Since then, the Air Force has improved their satellite design and released new versions of GPS satellites in blocks.
Starting with Block I, the Air Force has moved through Block IIA, Block IIR, Block IIR-M, and today they’ve completed the launch of their Block IIF series.
While only 30 GPS satellites are currently operational, 50 have been launched in total.
The most recent group of Block IIF satellites were launched between May of 2010 and today.
Col. Steve Whitney, the director of the Global Positioning System Directorate, said that the last leg of launches had “one of the most aggressive launch schedules of the last 20 years.”
There were 7 Block IIF satellites launched in just over 21 months.
The GPS Block IIF satellites were launched to improve the accuracy of GPS. Col. Steve Whitney, the director of the Global Positioning System Directorate, said that before the Block IIF series, the accuracy of GPS could be off by 1 meter.
With the new Block IIF satellites in place that error is down to 42 centimeters.
The change won’t mean much to the average civilian, but it could mean the difference between life and death for the military who uses GPS to guide munition to specific targets.
In order to make room for today’s satellite, the Air Force will move one of the older Block IIA satellites that was launched in 1990 out of its orbit.
Impressively, the satellite is still operational and will continue to serve the GPS constellation as a back-up satellite.
Now that Block IIF is up and running, the Air Force will shift its focus to the next series of Block III satellites for the GPS-3 constellation.
Block III satellites will continue to improve the accuracy and reliability of GPS navigation and will have upgraded anti-jamming and security capabilities for military signals.
Maintaining an up-to-date fully functioning GPS is pertinent to national security.
For these reasons, selecting a company to launch these assets is an important decision.
There’s been some controversy recently over which company (ULA or SpaceX) should launch the Air Force’s next block of satellites.
The decision has not yet been made.
The first GPS 3 satellites are scheduled to be launched in 2018.
This visualisation, comprised of imagery from the geostationary
satellites of EUMETSAT, NOAA and the JMA, shows an entire year of
weather across the globe during 2015, with audio commentary from Mark
Higgins, Training Manager at EUMETSAT.
Another
year of wild weather is behind us. But thanks to EUMETSAT, you can now
relive it in amazing high-definition video from space.
The new visualization uses geostationary satellite data from
EUMETSAT, the Japan Meteorological Agency and the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration to stitch together 365 days of data into one
stunning highlight reel of 2015’s weather.
And what a year it was. You’ll definitely want to keep your eye on the tropics throughout the animation as the northern hemisphere set a record for the most major tropical cyclones to form in a year.
Around the 6:30 mark, you can see the evolution of Hurricane Joaquin,
the strongest Atlantic hurricane of 2015. It went from a tropical
depression in late September to a Category 4 storm that battered the
Bahamas and menaced the East Coast before steering all the way across
the Atlantic and plowing into the U.K.
The transition of Hurricane Joaquin near the Bahamas to an extratropical storm that hit the U.K. Hurricane Patricia
became the strongest hurricane ever recorded in October and at the 6:55
mark, you can see it quickly slam into Mexico’s west coast before
heading inland to inundate parts of Texas.
But beyond the highlights, there’s also yearly the ebb and flow of weather on our fair planet. During the southern Amazon’s rainy season,
which last from December-April, you can see clouds pop up almost daily
to spread rains across the region.
Clouds become far less plentiful
during the region’s dry season.
And more broadly, you can see weather patterns flow across continents
and oceans.
Today’s storm in the Southeast U.S. is next week’s rain in
Spain.
By putting together a global view of our planet, EUMETSAT’s video
shows how our atmosphere is the common tie that binds humanity
together. There have been a few things updated since last year’s version.
For one, EUMETSAT has cranked the resolution to 4K for truly epic
detail.
And more importantly, the quality of satellites in space has
improved. Both Japan and EUMETSAT launched new satellites last year that have higher resolutions than their predecessors. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration plans to launch a new high resolution geostationary satellite this year, adding even more detailed coverage of the planet. That’s
good news if you want an even sharper 4K experience or improved
forecasts. And if you want both, well, then life is really good.
A Plastic Ocean is an adventure documentary shot on more than 20 locations over the past 4 years. Explorers Craig Leeson and Tanya Streeter and a team of international scientists reveal the causes and consequences of plastic pollution and share solutions.
This film directed by Emily V. Driscoll, is an award-winning short documentary that follows NYC sci-artist Mara G. Haseltine as she creates a sculpture to reveal a microscopic threat beneath the surface of the ocean.
During a Tara Oceans expedition to study the health of the oceans, Haseltine finds an unsettling presence in samples of plankton she collected.
The discovery inspires her to create a sculpture that shows that the microscopic ocean world affects all life on Earth.
Watch Mara G. Haseltine's art film featuring her sculpture and opera singer Joseph Bartning: La Boheme- A Portrait of Our Oceans in Peril vimeo.com/128797284
The video above describes how the sea swarm works. Bio-inspired Computation and Intelligent Machines Lab, Lisbon, Portugal, Initituto de Telecomunições, Lisbon, Portugal, University Instituite of Lisbon (ISCTE-IUL), Lisbon, Portugal
Robots may be the wave of the future, but it will be a pretty chaotic
future if they don't learn to work together.
This cooperative approach
is known as swarm robotics
and in a first in the field, a team of engineers has demonstrated a
swarm of intelligent aquatic surface robots that can operate together in
a real-world environment.
The sea-going robots are made using digital manufacturing techniques
(Credit: Biomachines Lab)
Using "Darwinian" learning, the robots are
designed to teach themselves how to cooperate in carrying out a task.
A major problem facing the navies of the world is
that as ships become more sophisticated they also become much more
expensive.
They are packed with highly trained personnel that cannot be
put at risk, except in the most extreme circumstances, and even the most
advanced ship suffers from not being able to be in two places at once.
One solution to this dilemma is to augment the ships
with swarms of robot boats that can act as auxiliary fleets at much
lower cost and without risk of life.
The tricky bit is figuring out how
to get this swarm to carry out missions without turning into a robotic
version of the Keystone Cops.
The approach being pursued by a team from
the Institute of Telecommunications at University Institute of Lisbon
and the University of Lisbon in Portugal is to rely on self-learning
robots.
Led by Dr. Anders Christensen, the team recently
demonstrated how up to ten robots can operate together to complete
various tasks.
The small robots are made of CNC-machined polystyrene
foam and 3D-printed components at a materials cost of about €300
(US$330).
The electronics pack include GPS, compass, Wi-Fi, and a
Raspberry Pi 2 computer.
However, the key is their decentralized
programming.
"Swarm robotics is a paradigm shift: we rely on many small, simple,
and inexpensive robots, instead of a single or a few large, complex, and
expensive robots," says Christensen.
"Controlling a large-scale swarm
of robots cannot be done centrally. Each robot must decide for itself
how to carry out the mission, and coordinate with its neighbors."
Instead of using a central computer or programming
each robot individually, the swarm operates on what the team calls a
Darwinian approach.
In other words, each robot is equipped with a neural
network that mimics the operations of a living brain.
The robots are
given a simple set of instructions about how to operate in relationship
to one another as well as mission goals.
The robots are then allowed to interact with one
another in a simulated environment and those that display successful
mission behavior are allowed to proceed.
The "fittest" robots from the
simulations are then tested in the real world.
According to the team, the clever bit about the swarm
is that, like schools of fish or flocks of birds, none of the robots
know of or "care" about the other robots beyond their immediate
neighbors. Instead, they react to what their immediate neighbors do as
they determine the best way to fulfill their mission objectives such as
area monitoring, navigation to waypoint, aggregation, and dispersion.
In
a sense, they learn to cooperate with one another.
The team is currently working on the next generation
of aquatic robots with more advanced sensors and the ability to handle
longer missions.
Eventually, they could be used in swarms numbering
hundreds or thousands of robots for environmental monitoring, search and
rescue, and maritime surveillance.
The team's research is being peer reviewed and is available here.
An increasing number of nonprofit organizations are relying on satellite imagery to monitor environmental degradation. Chief among them is SkyTruth, which has used this data to expose the extent of the BP oil spill, uncover mining damage, and track illegal fishing worldwide.
When Brian Schwartz, a Johns Hopkins University epidemiologist researching the public health impacts of hydraulic fracturing, read about an environmental group that uses satellite imagery and aerial photography to track environmental degradation, he was intrigued.
It was the summer of 2013, and the group, SkyTruth, had just launched a crowdsourcing project on its website to map fracking activity in Pennsylvania.
The site provided volunteers with U.S. government aerial images from across the state and a brief tutorial on how to identify fracking locations.
Within a month, more than 200 volunteers sorted through 9,000 images to pinpoint 2,724 fracking wellpads.
Schwartz ended up using this data in a study published last October in the journal Epidemiology, showing that women living near hydraulic fracturing sites in 40 Pennsylvania counties faced a significantly elevated risk of giving birth prematurely.
That’s precisely the sort of result that John Amos, SkyTruth’s president, envisioned when he founded the group in 2001.
He has since become part data analyst, part environmental advocate, and part satellite-imagery proselytizer as he looks for ways to use remote sensing to call attention to little-noticed environmental damage.
This month, SkyTruth’s website is displaying a map showing the global prevalence of flaring, the wasteful and carbon-spewing oil industry practice of burning natural gas and other drilling byproducts.
Through most of December, SkyTruth and another satellite-focused nonprofit, Moscow-based Transparent World,
displayed images of a burning oil platform and a 2,300-barrel oil slick
in the Caspian Sea.
The platform’s owner, Azerbaijan’s state-owned oil
company, SOCAR, denied that any spill had occurred.
In the 5 years since BP, there have been nearly 10,000 spills reported in the Gulf of Mexico
SkyTruth’s defining moment came in 2010, when Amos — analyzing satellite
photographs — sounded the alarm that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in
the Gulf of Mexico was far larger than the petroleum company, BP, and
the U.S. government were acknowledging.
“If you can see it,” says SkyTruth’s motto, displayed at the top of its website, “you can change it.”
One indication of SkyTruth’s influence is a cautionary headline that
appeared after SkyTruth formed a partnership with Google and the
nonprofit Oceana in November 2014 to launch a system called Global Fishing Watch,
which uses the satellite transponders found aboard most large fishing
vessels to track the activities of the world’s fishing fleets.
“Big
Brother is watching,” warned World Fishing & Aquaculture, a trade journal.
That admonition could be extended to all the extractive industries — oil
and gas, mining, logging, and fishing — whose operations can be tracked
by remote sensing.
A growing number of governments now conduct
environmental observation by satellite, including Brazil, which monitors
deforestation in the Amazon.
And environmental groups now commonly use
remote sensing tools.
One prominent example is Global Forest Watch,
a system launched two years by Washington-based World Resources
Institute to monitor logging and fires in the world’s forests.
Russia-based Transparent World employs satellite imagery for many
purposes, including monitoring of protected areas and observing the
impacts of dam construction.
Amos, 52, says he considered himself an environmentalist even while he
spent a decade working for oil and gas companies as a satellite imagery
analyst looking for drilling sites.
He quit in 2000 to start a
non-profit that would apply his skills to environmental protection.
For
years he ran SkyTruth from the basement of his Shepherdstown, West
Virginia home on an annual budget of less than $100,000, and he still speaks of “begging” satellite images from commercial providers.
Although SkyTruth has expanded in recent years to eight employees
supported by a $600,000 budget, it is still tiny, particularly compared
to the U.S. government’s massive satellite resources.
Nevertheless, SkyTruth has
delved into realms that the government has avoided.
One reason, Amos
says, is that satellite imagery analysis is so unfamiliar that “nobody
has known what to ask for” — thus, one of SkyTruth’s missions is to show
what’s possible.
Its usual method is to release a trove of
environment-related data, then invite researchers and crowdsource
amateurs to analyze it.
SkyTruth has benefited enormously from the explosion in the last 15
years in satellite imagery and other digital technologies.
When Amos
started SkyTruth, a single Landsat satellite image cost $4,400; now the
entire U.S. government collection— more than 4.7 million images and
growing daily— is available free of charge.
Not only have satellites and
satellite imagery become cheap, but the capacity to analyze, duplicate,
send, and store satellite data has expanded by orders of magnitude.
In
fact, satellite technology is now considered a subset of a larger field,
geospatial intelligence, which has tens of thousands of practitioners
around the world employing an array of optical, thermal, radar, and
radiometric remote sensing tools.
“It’s evolved from a problem of getting imagery to deciding which image
do I want to pluck out of this massive cloud,” Amos told me.
The finding by Schwartz, the Johns Hopkins epidemiologist, on premature
births suggests a correlation between fracking and poor human health;
but because the chemical trigger wasn’t identified, the link isn’t
regarded as causal.
From more than 1,000 available chemicals, fracking
operators select a dozen or so that fit the geological challenges of a
particular site.
People living near the site typically can’t find out
whether their wells and aquifers have been contaminated because the cost
of testing for all 1,000 chemicals is prohibitive, and operators treat
each site’s chemical recipe as a trade secret.
The quandary led Amos to venture beyond satellite imagery into the
larger field of geospatial data. Along with several better-known
environmental groups, SkyTruth argued for disclosure of the recipe used
at each frackingsite.
Two industry lobbying groups, the American Petroleum Institute and
America’s Natural Gas Alliance, defused mounting Congressional pressure
for mandatory disclosure by launching a website, FracFocus,
where operators could post their recipes voluntarily.
But soon after
the site’s launch in 2011, users found that information posted on it was
entered in the wrong field, misspelled chemical trade names, or omitted
key facts deemed proprietary.
The site thwarted researchers by
requiring postings in a format that computers couldn’t read.
Although 23
states require fracking companies to use FracFocus to disclose their
chemical use, a 2013 Harvard Law School report concluded that FracFocus’ “fails as a regulatory compliance tool.”
SkyTruth’s lead programmer, Paul Woods, devised a way around some of
FracFocus’ barriers by writing software that “scraped” all the chemical
data from the tens of thousands of reports posted on the site.
Then he
posted it in a database on SkyTruth’s website.
In addition, under
pressure from SkyTruth, other environmental groups, and an Energy
Department advisory board, FracFocus agreed to make its data available
in machine-readable form beginning in May 2015.
These developments have
yielded more and more information for researchers, such as Schwartz, who
are investigating fracking’s health impact.
“This is a very wonky issue that makes people’s eyes glaze over,” Amos
said.
“But it’s where the rubber meets the road in terms of
understanding if fracking is bad for you.”
The first time that SkyTruth attracted national attention was in April
2010, when Amos received a Google alert that an oil platform called
Deepwater Horizon, 50 miles off the Louisiana coast, had exploded and
burned.
Amos knew explosions like this one were uncommon and usually led
to spills.
He began searching for satellite photos, but the first ones he found
were obscured by clouds. Meanwhile, BP, which leased the rig, and the
Coast Guard, echoing BP, maintained that the ruptured well beneath the
rig was leaking oil at a rate of 1,000 barrels a day— a major spill but
perhaps not a catastrophic one.
The number was vital, for it would help
determine the scale and strategy of the leak containment effort, the
eventual cost to BP in fines and damages, and the scope of preparations
for the next spill.
It took Amos six days to acquire clear images.
His first thought, he
says, was: “Oh my God! This is much bigger than anybody realizes.”
He
calculated that the slick was 50 miles long and covered 817 square miles.
He outlined the slick, along with his calculations, and posted
both on SkyTruth’s website.
Within a day, Ian MacDonald, a Florida State University oceanographer
and oil slick authority, notified Amos that the leak’s flow rate was
much bigger than a thousand barrels a day.
Using Amos’ calculations of
the lick’s size and conservative assumptions about its thickness, MacDonald
concluded that it was “not unreasonable” that the leak was 20 times BP’s
initial estimate.
Undermined by SkyTruth’s numbers, the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration conceded the next day that BP’s
initial estimate was too low: over BP’s public objections, NOAA revised
the government estimate to 5,000 barrels a day.
Two months later, —
prodded, in part, by SkyTruth — government scientists concluded that the
initial flow rate was 62,000 barrels a day, 62 times BP’s initial
estimate.
SkyTruth has also affected the course of mountaintop removal coal
mining.
Appalachian states have issued hundreds of permits for
mountaintop removal mines, but they’ve rarely checked to see whether the
mines have stayed within the permitted boundaries.
Permits are supposed
to be issued only after assessing impacts on downstream waterways, and a
study of ten West Virginia counties published in 2004 by the state’s
environmental protection department found that nearly 40 percent of
mines in ten counties were situated outside permitted locations.
Acting on a request from Appalachian Voices,
a North Carolina-based nonprofit that opposes mountaintop removal
mining, SkyTruth devised a technique for identifying the mines from
satellite images, then mapped their growth over three decades and posted
the results on its website in 2009.
The information was used in six
peer-reviewed academic articles, including a Duke University study that
found that once five percent of a watershed is mined, water quality in
its rivers and streams usually fails to meet state standards.
That study
in turn provided empirical backing for the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency’s 2011 revocation of a mine permit
in West Virginia that had been issued by the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers.
The decision marked the first time the EPA had ever reversed a
coal mine’s permit under the Clean Water Act.
This June 21 2014 satellite photo from NASA, annotated by SkyTruth, shows an oil slick extending in an arc at least 8.3 miles (13.4 km) long from a well site at a Taylor Energy Co. platform that was toppled in an underwater mudslide triggered by Hurricane Ivan's waves in September 2004.
In search of images that tell environmental stories, SkyTruth pays close
attention to news reports, but occasionally it finds stories of its own.
One example is what is probably the Gulf of Mexico’s longest-running
commercial oil spill, at the site of a rig destroyed by an underwater
mudslide during Hurricane Ivan in 2004.
The slide buried 28 wells on the
sea floor under 100 feet of mud, which made sealing them extremely
difficult.
The rig’s owner, Taylor Energy Company, went bankrupt trying.
Amos discovered the leaks in 2010 while studying Hurricane Katrina’s
impacts, and has been sounding an alarm ever since.
The leaks have
trickled steadily into the Gulf’s waters since 2004 at a rate Amos
estimates at between one and 20 barrels a day, creating a slick that is
sometimes 20 miles long.
The wells are ten miles offshore in federally
managed water, but no federal agency has tried to seal the leak.
Given the controversial issues SkyTruth has been involved with, the
group has attracted surprisingly little criticism, perhaps because so
much of its work is grounded in visual data— for SkyTruth, seeing really
is believing.
A notable exception occurred in 2009 when Amos testified
at a U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing on the under-appreciated risks of
deepwater oil drilling.
Senator Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat,
attacked Amos for overlooking the oil industry’s safety record and
economic benefits.
“You do a great disservice by not telling the
American people the truth about drilling and putting it in the
perspective it deserves,” Landrieu told Amos.
Landrieu didn’t give Amos a chance to respond, but, as it turned out, he
didn’t have to.
The BP spill occurred five months later.
