Res Communis

Q Robert, the President met with the NASA Administrator today to talk about the Constellation program. Are the two in agreement now about what to do with that program going forward?
by P.J. Blount with the blog faculty

From the Press Briefing by White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, 12/16/09:

MR. GIBBS: I have not gotten a readout from the meeting, but we’ll try to see what has come of their discussions.

I don’t know that we’ll have a ton on this today. Obviously the budget here is being put together for next year. I know the most previous budget that was passed represented an increase in spending for NASA, and the President believes that NASA plays a vital role going forward.

Q Has that decision been reached yet and the two are talking about it? I mean, even like prior to the meeting.

MR. GIBBS: Let me get a readout from the meeting before I –

by P.J. Blount with the blog faculty

From ASI:

Italy and Russia make an agreement for a super telescope
ASI and ROSCOSMOS sign a deal to cooperate on Millimetron at Villa Madama. Italy will construct the spectrometer, a key instrument

03 Dec 2009

Italy and Russia will jointly assemble the Millimetron super telescope. The announcement was made during the Italo-Russo summit at Villa Madama. In the presence of the heads of government of both countries, Enrico Saggese, the president of the Italian Space Agency, and Anatoly Nikolayevich Perminov, the head of the Russian agency ROSCOSMOS, signed an agreement regarding bilateral cooperation on the cosmological observation mission. As part of this agreement Italy will contribute the polarimetric spectrometer, one of Millimetron’s principal instruments.

Millimetron is a Russian space mission that plans to construct an orbiting observatory equipped with a mirror 12 metres in diameter, an absolute record in the history of space missions. The telescope will operate in a wide band of the electromagnetic spectrum, in the submillimetre, millimetre and far infrared (a wavelength between 20 µm and 20 mm) wavelength regions and will enable astronomers to observe the Universe with unprecedented sensitivity, angular resolution and spectro-polarimetric capacity. These electromagnetic bands are one of the most promising windows for observing the Universe, being full of scientific information and relatively unexplored. Millimetron will be able to throw light on the cold Universe, the cosmological structures on a wide scale, the nature of dark matter and dark energy, and the evolution of galaxy clusters, galaxies, stars and planets. The images at extremely high angular resolution obtainable in VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry) mode, a technique that connects independent antennae as if they were part of one single, gigantic instrument) will allow us to study, with unprecedented clarity, compact and ultra-compact astronomical objects. The date for launching Millimetron is scheduled for 2018-2019.

The technical capacity of Millimetron, which, for the first time, will allow us to study the Universe and its structures in 3D by spatially resolved spectro-polarimetric analyses, requires an innovative and high performance instrument. As part of the collaboration agreement, Italy – under the coordination and supervision of the ASI – will supply expertise, feasibility studies, project design and construction of one of Millimetron’s most important and pioneering instruments: the FTS (SP-FTS) spectro-polarimeter. The instrument is an innovative evolution of the FTS spectrometer which has already successfully been designed for the Phase-A studio of the minor ASI mission, SAGACE.
The project and the feasibility study for the SP-FTS instrument have already received the full support of the scientific community concerned (the universities involved and INAF) and the PMI in the design and scientific use of the instrument. The SP-FTS instrument project, central for Millimetron, makes the Italian scientific community and the ASI principal technical and scientific partners in the Millimetron consortium, and in general will contribute to strengthening the multi-project collaboration between the ASI and ROSCOSMOS.

Millimetron is part of a long line of scientific and technical developments already initiated by the ASI alongside its support of the PLANCK and HERSCHEL missions and the two minor projects OLIMPO (a long duration stratospheric balloon flight) and SAGACE (a minor spectral-imaging surveying mission).
An international consortium is being formed to accomplish the Millimetron mission. At the moment, the Millimetron consortium is formed by the Millimetron International Scientific Committee (MISC) and the Millimetron Management Committee (MMC).

by P.J. Blount with the blog faculty

From ESA:

ESA and World Bank move towards closer collaboration

15 December 2009
The World Bank is a vital source of financial and technical assistance to developing countries around the world. At first glance, this may not appear to be connected to space technology, but large development projects and the state of Earth’s environment are intrinsically linked.

Global climate change is also an increasingly important challenge in overcoming poverty and advancing development in the poorest countries and communities, which will suffer the earliest and the most.

These factors have led to a growing demand for information about the state of Earth’s environment – land, oceans, atmosphere, cryosphere. The global scale, consistency and timeliness of the required information means looking at new sources of measurements: the view from space.

From their unique vantage point, Earth observation (EO) satellites are powerful tools for monitoring the environment consistently around the globe, and over time. This information can be used to support the planning, implementation and assessment of a wide range of World Bank projects, many of which may be affected by climate change.

Given the increasing demand for geospatial information, ESA (hosted by the Sustainable Development Team) met with the World Bank in 2008 to raise awareness on how European EO missions and specialist information services available from European companies could support World Bank projects around the globe.

Following the visit, ESA carried out some initial demonstrations over the last year to illustrate the potential of EO information and methodologies for World Bank activities helping countries better adapt to climate change.

Monthly average temperatures and thermal regimes
Coral reef monitoring

Research indicates that coral reefs will not survive the rapid increases in global temperatures and atmospheric carbon dioxide forecasted for this century by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Coral reefs are threatened by overfishing, coastal pollution, global warming and ocean acidification.

To help the World Bank monitor the health of coral reefs in the Caribbean, ESA led a project that generated state-of-the-art EO-based information to understand the capabilities of resistance and recovery from disturbances of coral reefs off the coast of Belize.

The project incorporated sea-surface temperature data from the Along-Track Scanning Radiometer and the Advanced Along-Track Scanning Radiometer on ESA’s ERS-2 and Envisat satellites, wind speed and direction data from the Active Microwave Instrument (AMI) on ERS-2 and imagery from NASA’s Landsat to identify coastline and reef-crest areas.

Using these data, scientists from the University of Exeter mapped a number of important factors influencing coral health in the Northern Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System (NMBRS). These included chronic and acute thermal stress regimes, wave exposure areas and reef connectivity (for larvae dispersion).

Results showed that those areas predicted to fare better under climate change (from a thermal perspective) are rare and scattered across the study area. Also, if over-fished, some areas are more vulnerable to becoming dominated by seaweed with a resultant loss of corals (for example, north of the barrier reef and the seaward side of the atolls). Finally, the reefs are in general well connected, facilitating the dispersion of larvae.

The demonstration confirmed EO data can be used to map the locations of reef habitats and to understand better what regions are more vulnerable and likely to experience coral bleaching.

“Space-based observations are an essential element of climate monitoring in Latin America and a complement to ground-based stations,” said Walter Vergara, Lead Engineer-Latin America Environment Department at the World Bank. “ESA instruments and observation protocols are particularly applicable to the type of information that needs to be collected over time in the Americas.”

Trends of erosion in Bangladesh

Trends of erosion in Bangladesh

Coastal change monitoring

According to the UN, Bangladesh is one of the few countries to experience potentially catastrophic consequences of climatic change. A critical variable that determines the vulnerability of the South Asian country to climate change impact is the magnitude of sea-level rise.

ESA carried out projects to demonstrate the potential of different EO data and methodologies for coastal change mapping to provide improved input data for models that try to describe the long-term effects of possible sea-level rise due to global warming.

Using EO data from the Disaster Management Constellation (DMC), SPOT, NASA’s Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper, ASTER, Ikonos, and QuickBird from the last decade over the majority of Bangladesh’s coastal region, scientists were able to illustrate how EO can contribute to coastal monitoring.

The situation is very complex owing to large tidal effects in the area. The individual annual erosion and accumulation rates observed from EO satellites show strong spatial variability, as seen in the image above.

“The coastline of Bangladesh is extremely dynamic, making it difficult to predict how sea-level rise may impact the southern part of the country,” said Winston Yu, Water Resources Specialist at the World Bank. “These preliminary results from EO are interesting and merit further investigation into the accretion and erosion processes occurring.”

ESA and World Bank discussions

ESA and World Bank discussions
Coastal Cities

ESA is now starting an additional project to quantify land subsidence from EO over the last decade for the city of Alexandria, Egypt, which extends widely along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. This information will be used, together with many other sources, in a World Bank study to assess the exposure and risk of coastal cities to the possible effects of climate change in the future.

“There is very little scientific evidence of the subsidence that has been taking place along the Nile Delta coastline, and whether the city of Alexandria has been affected as well,” said Anthony Bigio, senior urban specialist at the World Bank for the Middle East and North African region. “We therefore very much look forward to EO filling this gap, and we are sure that it will be an important input for the study we are carrying out on climate change adaptation and natural disaster preparedness in the coastal cities of North Africa.”

Next Developments

These initial demonstrations have raised interest from the World Bank in European EO capabilities, and further requests for support are in the pipeline. Discussions are under way for ESA to support additional projects such as sea-level rise in the Caribbean, forest degradation in the Amazon, and water resources management in the Maghreb and Middle East regions.

There are many other possibilities for EO information to be put to use in World Bank activities; both organisations look forward to a longer-term and more formalised form of collaboration.