Category Archives: Eyes in the Sky

The Canadian company UrtheCast has high definition earth-observation cameras mounted on the exterior of the Int. Space Station and it has a set of earth-obs satellites.

Urthecast has announced that it will assist the monitoring of the health of forests globally by providing free access to its image archives to scientists and others via the Global Forest Watch organization: UrtheCast Releases UHD Images Of World’s Forests on Global Forest Watch

Monitoring the world’s forests requires looking at things both large and small. With forests covering a vast 30 percent of the Earth’s land surface, large-scale public satellite programs help scan forests rapidly at medium and coarse resolutions. But to really understand how a forest is changing, or identify the drivers of deforestation, you need ultra-high-resolution satellite images that show the finer details. Forest managers have traditionally lacked the latter — less than a decade ago, even a moderate-resolution image could have cost thousands of dollars, rendering this powerful resource too expensive for conservation efforts.

That all changed when NASA and USGS released their Landsat archives for free, and the game may be about to change again. Companies are now pioneering ways to also bring high-resolution images to scientists and the public at little or no cost to analyze them for critical information about forests around the world.

UrtheCast is the latest company to lend its immense Earth Observation capacity to the cause, in partnership with Global Forest Watch (GFW) — a dynamic online platform that allows anyone, anywhere with an internet connection to monitor the loss of trees around the world. Soon, Global Forest Watch will roll out a feature that allows users free access to UrtheCast images, ranging in resolution from 20m to as high as 70cm in resolution, all sortable by filter, maximum cloud cover percentage, and date range.

GFW users will also be able to subscribe to email updates and can be notified as new images for their areas of interest are acquired. Care about fires in Indonesia or the spread of illegal logging in Peru? You’ll be able to track these changes not only using GFW’s data sets and alert systems, but see them with your own eyes.

Today, many forest stakeholders rely on remote sensing technologies powered by satellite imagery to make better informed decisions around forest management and conservation. Thanks to companies like UrtheCast, access to high-quality images continues to increase, as does our ability to monitor global forest change and put information into the hands of more stakeholders around the world.

Perspectives from UrtheCast on Vimeo.

Eyes in the Sky

Satellite images: Fight drought in Ethiopia + Help earthquake victims + Reveal ancient Kazakh earthworks

November 17, 2015 TopSpacer

A small sampling of the use of satellite earth observation imagery:

* Satellites help fight drought in Ethiopia – UNICEF Connect

Ethiopia is currently in one of its periodic droughts. Satellites are

One of the most affected areas in the country is the Afar Region in the Great Rift Valley where daily temperatures can exceed 44 degrees Celsius and there is less than 300mm of rain annually.

Most of the Afar region’s population of 1.5 million people survive mainly on herding (92 percent), and the animals need water. Water the existing wells aren’t providing.

This is where satellites come in. UNICEF analyzes information the satellites provide on ground vegetation, topology and morphology, combined with hydro-geological information on the region, and pinpoints the best place to drill wells.

Ethiopia-satellite-1[1] — *UNICEF Ethiopia/ 2015/Tesfaye – Launching the mini-village water scheme project north of Samera in Ethiopia*

Just 84 km north of Afar’s capital of Samera, UNICEF put its remote sensing satellite plan into action. The government identified the district of Elidar as a priority location—shepherds head there due to water shortages elsewhere.

Currently, people rely on expensive commercial trucks to haul in water because most of the water found by digging wells is very salty. Deep underground, however, lies fresh water, and the UNICEF-directed remote sensing investigations have found just the right places to drill boreholes down between 250 and 300 metres.

Three boreholes will be drilled by end December 2015. These wells will provide more than 100,000 people with access to safe water. A contract has been awarded to a private drilling contractor at a cost of 9 million birr (US$ 433,264), and UNICEF will supervise the works with the local water bureau.

* Radar satellites to provide faster response to earthquake victims

Compare and contrast: A better way to use satellite images to save lives after tremors – The Economist

Sang-Ho Yun and his team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have developed techniques to use satellite radar images automaticalluy to locate the specific areas that were shifted up or down the most by a large earthquake. Such information could be used by first responders to go to the places with the worst damage.

They recently tested the approach with radar taken of Nepal taken shortly after the magnitude 7.8 earthquake happened in April. They found that their analysis of the images matched well with independent determinations of regional damage by teams from the UN, the US Geological Survey, and the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

* Mysterious 8000 year old earthworks in Kazakhstan spotted by satellites

Using satellite images available through Google Earth, the amateur Kazakh archaeologist Dmitriy Dey in 2007 spotted unusual structures in the Turgay Trough region of Kazakhstan. The structures, visible only from high altitudes, were subsequently found to have been created in Neolithic times about 8000 years ago. He has now found over 260 such structures. Some excavations in the region have found some artifacts but what group built the structures and why remains unknown.

Credits DigitalGlobe via NASA

Eyes in the Sky, Space Systems

Videos: Planets Labs takes daily snapshots of the the Earth

November 12, 2015 TopSpacer

This NASA video highlights Planet Labs, which is using a constellation of small satellites to image the earth daily. So far, most of the Planet Labs Dove satellites have been inserted into orbit from the Int. Space Station via the assistance of the company NanoRacks, which has an agreement with the Japanese space agency for the use of its facilities on the ISS.

Here is a video about the Planet Labs open access image archive of California:

https://youtu.be/tEGgWmAODQ8

Eyes in the Sky, Living in Space, Space books

“The Orbital Perspective” – astronaut Ron Garan’s new book

October 29, 2015 TopSpacer

Astronaut Ron Garan shared many wonderful images of earth with the public via social media during his stay aboard the International Space Station. He has now written a book about his time in space and about the special view of earth available from there: The Orbital Perspective: Lessons in Seeing the Big Picture from a Journey of 71 Million Miles.

John Blake Publishing is delighted to announce the publication of The Orbital Perspective: An Astronaut’s View by Colonel Ron Garan. This thrilling narrative explores Garan’s extraordinary life, from fighter pilot turned astronaut and reveals how his life transformed in a way that he could never have foreseen.

Garan’s perspective of life on Earth changed entirely when he became one of only a handful of humans to have seen the stunningly rare and fragile beauty of earth from space. His views of earth as a tiny marble 240 miles below him, led him to see a way forward without divisions of race, nations or religion.

As founder of the ‘Fragile Oasis’ project, Garan aimed to connect the orbital perspective and scientific expertise of astronauts, with those on earth in an attempt to make a difference.

Along the lines of Chris Hadfield’s An Astronauts to Life, this utterly unique memoir combines 177 days spent in space, with a powerful message of the need for optimism, trust and global collaboration in order to sustain our way of life. It asks humanity to come together so as to protect the most valuable space station of all – the Earth.

——

‘Unique… reminds us of our common humanity and that the pressing challenges we face,
we must face and resolve together’
Kofi Annan, Nobel Peace Laureate

The Orbital Perspective by Ron Garan is published by
John Blake Publishing in hardback on 5^th November 2015.

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Eyes in the Sky

Videos: Views of Hurricane Patricia from space

October 24, 2015 TopSpacer

Space videos of hurricane Patricia:

* NASA/NOAA video – NASA Analyzes Record-Breaking Hurricane Patricia – NASA – great images as well.

At 8 a.m. EDT on October 23, 2015, the National Hurricane Center reported Patricia became the strongest eastern north pacific hurricane on record with sustained winds near 200 mph. This animation of images captured from October 20 to 23 from NOAA’s GOES-West satellite shows Hurricane Patricia near western Mexico. Credit: NASA/NOAA GOES Project