Remote Sensing

Satellite technology to aid fishermen in India

The Indian Remote Sensing Applications Centre at Hyderabad has been giving readings of the remote sensing satellite to all the fishing harbors to help the fishermen to track the fish shoals. The system works on the basis of the GPS technology and satellite mapping of the seas. The government shall set up an earth station not bigger than a computer room with modern gadgets. http://mangalorean.com

Satellite pictures tell of human rights violation

A project launched by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) aims to use satellite imagery to provide evidence of human rights atrocities. The AAAS worked with Human Rights Watch to produce a 130-page report on attacks on 8 villages across the remote Ogaden region of eastern Ethiopia, where “before” and “after” satellite images of villages were analysed. It shows blackened fields and destroyed homes where before there were whole villages. www.sbs.com.au

Indian space Research organisation to launch satellite to study climate change

Few issues have taken the global centre stage as did climate change recently, and images of melting polar ice caps and rising sea levels are now all too ubiquitous to ignore. But how much do we really know about global warming?
What is the quantity of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere? How are they distributed around the world? Some answers might be brought back by I-STAG (Indian Satellite for Aerosol and Gases), a small satellite to be launched by ISRO in 2012. It will collect data on the quantity and distribution of green house gases and other content to estimate an impact on climate.

The satellite will have a special focus on the tropics and will monitor the spatial and temporal variation in the amount of these gases to assess their long-term effect on the climate and ecosystem. The experiments would also attempt to estimate the impact of biomass burning and forest fires on climate.

I-STAG will be developed jointly by the Indian Institute of Science, the Space Physics Laboratory in Thiruvananthapuram, the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad, and the National Atmospheric Research Laboratory in Tirupati.

I-STAG is part of the space organisation’s “small satellites programme” for scientific experiments, said ISRO Chairman G. Madhavan Nair. “The first of the series of small satellite was the Indian Mini Satellite, which flew with CARTOSAT-2A.

Jason-2 successfully launched

CNES and NASA have launched the Ocean Surface Topography Mission/ Jason 2 satellite on 20th June to continue charting sea level, a vital indicator of global climate change. The mission will return a vast amount of new data that will improve weather, climate and ocean forecasts.Measurements of sea-surface height, or ocean surface topography, reveal the speed and direction of ocean currents and tell scientists how much of the sun’s energy is stored by the ocean. Combining ocean current and heat storage data is key to understanding global climate variations. NOAA will use the improved data to better predict hurricane intensity, which is directly affected by the amount of heat stored in the upper ocean.