ASU camera creates stunning mosaic of moon's polar region

Tempe AZ (SPX) Mar 25, 2014

LROC northern polar mosaic with three levels of zoom-down into Thales crater. Image courtesy NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University.

the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC), run by the Arizona State University-based team under professor Mark Robinson, released what very well may be the largest image mosaic available on the web. This map offers a complete picture of the moon's northern polar region in stunning detail.
On December 11, 2011, after two and a half years in a near-circular polar orbit, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) entered an elliptical polar orbit, with the periapsis (point where the LRO is closest to the surface) near the south pole, and the apoapsis (point where LRO is furthest from the surface) near the north pole of the moon.
The increased altitude over the northern hemisphere enables the two narrow angle cameras and the wide angle camera to capture more terrain in each image acquired in the northern hemisphere.
The resulting LROC northern polar mosaic is comprised of 10,581 narrow angle camera images, collected over four years, and covers the latitude range of zero to 60 degrees north.
In the fall of 2010, the LROC team produced its first mosaic of the moon's northern polar region, but it doesn't even compare to this new mosaic, with its 50-times-higher resolution, and over 680 gigapixels of valid image data covering a region of the moon slightly larger than the combined area of Alaska and Texas - at a resolution of 2 meters per pixel.

US's old satellites cannot track Malaysian airplane, as war drones suck funds dry

Moscow (Voice of Russia) Mar 25, 2014

File image.

The US's old satellites cannot track the missing Malaysian airplane as money is being spent on war drones instead. As the world grows obsessed with drone imagery, it comes at the expense of ignoring satellite radar technology. In today's day and age, high-resolution image satellites are capable of snapping very detailed photos of small locations.
However, an imagery solutions manager for the firm Esri believes that old-fashioned radar satellites are superior at finding lost items at sea.
Radar satellites in all actuality do not see the world but instead get a sense of different items the same way a bat does. For bats, they use sonar to hit signals off of prey to figure out their target's location and other surrounding objects. From the technology side, radar satellites take thorough scans of the planet by hitting electromagnetic signals off of the surface of the earth.
It has been noted that officials in the military sector will not publicly disclose what exact instruments they are using to search for the missing plane. However military wise, these model satellites were excellent for looking over huge spaces where clouds covered the surroundings or to locate ghost ships that had turned off their unit. The satellites are also helpful at finding anomalies at sea.
"If there's any oil slick that stands out well because there's these flat dark spots where there are no wave ripples at all. If there's an angular thing, like maybe a wing floating on the surface or some type of debris, that stuff stands out brightly" Kurt Schwoppe, the Esri manager, said, according to a defenseone.com article.
It is the kind of technology that NASA was head of development back in the 1970s. Nowadays, space-centered radar is a sector where other nations are out out-developing the US, at least from a commercial standpoint of view. The big players in the industry are AirBus and RADARSAT (which has Lockheed Martin involved but is managed out of Canada by MacDonald, Dettwiler, and Associates). "From a commercial company standpoint, we have not flown a radar satellite ourselves," Schwoppe admitted.

First Images Available from NASA-JAXA Global Rain and Snowfall Satellite

Greenbelt MD (SPX) Mar 26, 2014

An extra-tropical cyclone seen off the coast of Japan, March 10, 2014, by the GPM Microwave Imager. The colors show the rain rate: red areas indicate heavy rainfall, while yellow and blue indicate less intense rainfall. The upper left blue areas indicate falling snow. For a larger version of this image please go here. For a video on this research and other images please go here.

NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) have released the first images captured by their newest Earth-observing satellite, the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Core Observatory, which launched into space Feb. 27.
The images show precipitation falling inside a March 10 cyclone over the northwest Pacific Ocean, approximately 1,000 miles east of Japan. The data were collected by the GPM Core Observatory's two instruments: JAXA's Dual-frequency Precipitation Radar (DPR), which imaged a three-dimensional cross-section of the storm; and, NASA's GPM Microwave Imager (GMI), which observed precipitation across a broad swath.
"It was really exciting to see this high-quality GPM data for the first time," said GPM project scientist Gail Skofronick-Jackson at NASA's Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "I knew we had entered a new era in measuring precipitation from space. We now can measure global precipitation of all types, from light drizzle to heavy downpours to falling snow."
The satellite's capabilities are apparent in the first images of the cyclone. Cyclones such as the one imaged -- an extra-tropical cyclone -- occur when masses of warm air collide with masses of cold air north or south of the tropics. These storm systems can produce rain, snow, ice, high winds, and other severe weather.
In these first images, the warm front ahead of the cyclone shows a broad area of precipitation -- in this case, rain -- with a narrower band of precipitation associated with the cold front trailing to the southwest. Snow is seen falling in the northern reaches of the storm.
The GMI instrument has 13 channels that measure natural energy radiated by Earth's surface and also by precipitation itself. Liquid raindrops and ice particles affect the microwave energy differently, so each channel is sensitive to a different precipitation type. With the addition of four new channels, the GPM Core Observatory is the first spacecraft designed to detect light rain and snowfall from space.