US Air Force to launch new surveillance satellites

Washington (AFP) July 23, 2014
The US Air Force will launch new satellites Wednesday to track those of other countries and counter possible threats to American spacecraft, officials said.
Two satellites are due to be sent into high-altitude orbits for the first time as part of a program that until a few months ago was strictly secret and classified.
The satellites will be launched from Delta IV rockets from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida and head to the geosynchronous belt, 22,300 miles (35,900 kilometers) above Earth, where crucial US satellites are also orbiting.
"This neighborhood watch twosome will help protect our precious assets in geo (high-altitude orbit), plus they will be on the lookout for nefarious capability other nations might try to place in that critical orbital regime," US Air Force Space Command chief General William Shelton told reporters.
Shelton said the satellites would dramatically improve the US military's picture of satellite traffic in the geosynchronous orbit, as the new satellites will be much closer at the higher altitude.
Current space surveillance is conducted from the Earth or from lower altitudes of a few hundred miles above Earth.
The project is known as the Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program, or GSSAP, and was first publicly acknowledged in March.

OCO-2 Data to Lead Scientists Forward into the Past

Pasadena CA (JPL) Jul 23, 2014

Scientists will use measurements from the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 to track atmospheric carbon dioxide to sources such as these wildfires in Siberia, whose smoke plumes quickly carry the greenhouse gas worldwide. The fires were imaged on May 18 by NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer instrument on the Terra satellite. Image courtesy NASA/LANCE/EOSDIS Rapid Response. For a larger version of this image please go here.

NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2, which launched on July 2, will soon be providing about 100,000 high-quality measurements each day of carbon dioxide concentrations from around the globe. Atmospheric scientists are excited about that. But to understand the processes that control the amount of the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, they need to know more than just where carbon dioxide is now. They need to know where it has been. It takes more than great data to figure that out.
"In a sense, you're trying to go backward in time and space," said David Baker, a scientist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. "You're reversing the flow of the winds to determine when and where the input of carbon at the Earth's surface had to be to give you the measurements you see now."
Harry Potter used a magical time turner to travel to the past. Atmospheric scientists use a type of computer model called a chemical transport model.
It combines the atmospheric processes found in a climate model with additional information on important chemical compounds, including their reactions, their sources on Earth's surface and the processes that remove them from the air, known as sinks.
Baker used the example of a forest fire to explain how a chemical transport model works. "Where the fire is, at that point in time, you get a pulse of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the burning carbon in wood. The model's winds blow it along, and mixing processes dilute it through the atmosphere. It gradually gets mixed into a wider and wider plume that eventually gets blown around the world."

Rising-2 captured highest resolution image of earth’s surface

2014/07/16

Sendai, Japan - July 4, 2014 – Microsatellite Rising-2 has succeeded in capturing high precision images of the earth’s surface. Using a High Precision Telescope (HPT), it has successfully taken color images at a spatial resolution of 5m, the highest in the world among 50kg-class satellites.
Rising-2 is a microsatellite developed by Tohoku University and Hokkaido University. It was launched from the Tanegashima Space Center, Japan, on May 24, 2014, and has been conducting various test operations. Dayside cloud imagery and night views of city lights and air glow have been acquired so far using a Wide Field-of-view CCD camera (WFC), and high resolution imaging experiments using HPT have recently started. On July 2, Rising-2 succeeded in shooting detailed landscape in sunny spells during the rainy season as shown in the following attachment.

Planetary orbit insertion failures (part 2)

by Andrew J. LePage
Monday, June 23, 2014 

[Editor’s Note: Part 1 of this article on failed attempts by spacecraft to enter orbit around other worlds in the solar system appeared last week.]

Mars Observer

Artist concept of the Mars Observer in orbit around Mars. (credit: NASA)

Mars Observer was the first American mission to Mars since Viking was launched in 1975. It was the first in NASA’s new Planetary Observer series of missions that adapted existing spacecraft and instruments for planetary missions with the intent to keep costs low in a time of tight federal budgets. To this end, Mars Observer employed General Electric’s three-axis stabilized Satcom K communication satellite bus as well as subsystems from military and civilian polar orbiting meteorological satellites. Mars Observer’s mission was to perform a wide range of investigations of Mars using an extensive suite of instruments from a circular 350-kilometer (218-mile) orbit.

Although there are many possible causes, the consensus seems to be that Mars Observer was lost as a result of a fatal failure of the propulsion system.

After years of delays, cost overruns, and a switch from the Space Shuttle to a Commercial Titan III/TOS for launch as a result of the 1986 Challenger disaster, Mars Observer finally lifted off on September 25, 1992, and was sent on its way to Mars. In order to avoid issues encountered with the propulsion system on the Viking spacecraft during their transit to Mars, the decision had been made seven months before launch to postpone the pressurization of the propellant tanks that fed a redundant pair of 490-newton (110-pound-force) bipropellant engines to be used for major maneuvers, including the vital 28-minute, 50-second orbit insertion burn. Minor course corrections took place during the cruise to Mars in a “blow down” mode that did not require full pressurization of the system.

Big Black Bird

by Dwayne A. Day Monday, July 14, 2014 Elements of the Manned Orbital Laboratory under construction in the 1960s. (credit: USAF) After five decades of secrecy, the details of the 1960s-era Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) program are finally being revealed. MOL was started in late 1963 but did not get a formal approval from President Lyndon Johnson until 1965. Publicly, it was a two-person military space station program to conduct experiments to determine what military missions humans could accomplish in space.

Heavy glass: The KH-10 DORIAN reconnaissance system

by Dwayne A. Day
Monday, July 21, 2014

Illustration of the MOL in orbit, performing reconnaissance activities. (credit: USAF)

In the mid-1960s, an American reconnaissance satellite overflew the Soviet submarine construction facility at Severodvinsk and got lucky: a Soviet submarine was out of the water, up on rails, and in plain sight, providing a rare view of its propeller. Normally when submarines are in the water their propellers are not visible, and knowing the number of blades on a propeller is useful information for knowing how fast a submarine is moving. Sonar operators on ships or other submarines can count the number of times the blades beat the water and estimate a vessel’s speed. So this photo was a real coup. Not too long after it was taken, it was used by an instructor who was then training Air Force astronauts. He showed it to them as an example of the kind of opportunities that they might find as they orbited the Earth, peering down on the Soviet Union.
Such “targets of opportunity” were a key justification for the existence of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) program of the 1960s. Although American robotic reconnaissance satellites had been operating since August 1960, some people in the US military and intelligence communities believed that astronauts could play an important role in reconnaissance. Although MOL started out as a general-purpose experimental space station, it soon evolved into a spacecraft with an operational—and highly classified—reconnaissance mission.

ADS and Esri Take Satellite Imagery Services to a Premium Level

Paris (SPX) Jul 21, 2014

ArcGIS Online users will also be able to order Pleiades and SPOT 6 (and soon 7) archive imagery with an easy-to-use Satellite Tasking and Archive app.

Airbus Defense and Space and Esri have developed three new Premium Content Services to provide ArcGIS Online users with an option to access Pleiades and SPOT thematic imagery, customized monitoring services, and for the first time on the ArcGIS Marketplace, users can directly task Airbus Defense and Space's optical satellites online.
These services will be launched this week at the Esri International User Conference, July 14-18 in San Diego, CA.
The developments have been done under the umbrella of an agreement both companies have signed in order to provide a new level of geo-intelligence imagery and services through Esri's ArcGIS Marketplace.
The ArcGIS Marketplace is a destination where ArcGIS Online users can search, discover, and get apps and data from qualified providers for use within their organization. The Airbus Defense and Space Premium Content Services listed in the Marketplace will be available to ArcGIS users worldwide.
"We are very excited to be able to provide ArcGIS users with unprecedented access to our satellite imagery products and services," said Bernhard Brenner, Head of the Geo-Intelligence program line of Airbus Defense and Space. "Working directly with the Esri team has enabled us to develop three services we know will fit the needs of ArcGIS users. We will be providing demos at the Esri International User Conference."

DigitalGlobe Announces New Oil & Gas Offerings From Spatial Energy

Wednesday, June 18th 2014

Spatial Energy | Longmont, CO

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LONGMONT, CO, Jun 18, 2014- DigitalGlobe, Inc. a leading global provider of commercial high-resolution earth observation and advanced geospatial solutions, today announced the availability of the first in a series of new commercial offerings for the energy market from recently acquired Spatial Energy.
The new DigitalGlobe Energy Suite includes online, subscription-based offerings available to enterprise oil and gas customers through Spatial on Demand, its market-leading cloud-based enterprise data management platform. The suite provides immediate access to information and insight that can be integrated with desktop workflows across the entire energy enterprise, which will become available to Spatial on Demand customers on July 1.
The first set of products in the DigitalGlobe Energy Suite includes:
Basemap +Energy
Basemap +Energy is an online living globe tailored specifically for energy customer accuracy, update, and historical needs. It is the only source of constantly updated 50 cm imagery with supporting metadata and simple download capability, making it the single source of the best available data for use by global stakeholders.