Slashdot Mirror
Monster European Environmental Satellite
andygood writes: "Spaceflight Now has this article about the 'Mother of All Earth Observation Satellites' which will be launched by Europe in early 2002. This thing is the size of a juggernaut and 'every hour will gather as much data as can be stored on a dozen PC hard disks'. 'ENVISAT' (ENVIronmental SATellite) has been in the works for almost fourteen years with a price tag of 2.3 billion (Euro)."
If we have a satellite the size of Juggernaut, the Worm Ouroborous, or the walls of Gormenghast Castle, we can have verify any of this from above.
when i first saw the picture, i thought it was a giant football field with goalposts and everything... good thing they have sense.
now, what i want to know is, if it's SO good at monitoring ice flows and mud slides, can it monitor THE BLOB?!?!?!?!?
-j
-- http://www.cerastes.org
I give it a 1 in 4 chance of either flying right into a mountain on take off, the rocket not taking off at all or it not reaching the correct orbit. Not to be a pessamist but it seems like every other launch lately does one something wrong.
It's not the OS it's the user that sucks. If it's user friendly, you get stupider people. - clinko
No, it uses Molson, and you can only sniff it.
how much data the European Space Agency thinks can be stored on a "PC Hard Disk" nowadays... 1 GB, 10 GB, 100 GB? They're a little short on meaningful statistics. But it's a press release - the only time the press does math is when one of them gets stuck with the bar tab and figures out a tip.
It would also be interesting to hear what storage technology they're using. Surely they're not flying a Terabyte RAID5 array (what with launch vibration, etc.). More likely dense and hardened DRAM (and lots of it), I'd guess. It almost makes me want to go read the article to find this out.
Is it me, or is the technology revolution slowly, but ever so surely raping our rights away from us, first the DMCA, then our government is going to tap attorney and clients phone conversations, and the launching of huge satellites such as these designed to watch our every move, its like a book i read 1984, hell we are even developing newspeak, and we just formed the miniluv, headed by Tommy Ridge, this nation is slowly sinking into a police state, and i for one cannot stand it any longer. I realize the need for security, but at what cost come security. For "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" Benjamin Franklin
I hate sigs.
Sounds like a little too much hype. The article and write up say the thing collects enough info every hour to fill a dozen hard drives. But what size hard drives? The project started in 1988, so are we using 1988 hard drives? That should be about 50MB each, so a dozen totals a whopping 600MB of data. Wow.
But it's still looks like a bunch of aluminum foil and bowls put together by some second grader. I can't believe nasa put the brakes on the X11... We need a better way to get stuff into space! I want death star!
We would run out of space.
Y'know, if we got all these satellite guys together, the ones in the previous story could have helped the EU save a few billion by using parts from Radio Shack...
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Used to be commies, now there is a new frontier of international phobia. Better rip out those tooth fillings, the Sky Juggernaut will be able to read your mind through them. And by all means, for gods sake, get rid of that TV!
Scary, yet extremely neat.
At least we make UTILE satellites. Not millions of dangerous military crap only usefull for take money from the goverment into private pockets...
The same can be accomplished by 8 college students using Gnutella every night.
Now, I don't know the dollars->euro exchange rate, but whatever it is, that is still amazingly cheap for a satalite of that caliber. Contrast with hubble: the cost of that was in the trillions; an order of magnitude higher.
Why can't NASA accomplish anything like this?
That is, build the biggest "something" then launch it during the early part of the year. It was called the Titanic. Here's hoping there are no icebergs on the way up.
Can what is formed say to that who formed it, "Why have you made me thus?"
Please clue me in!
This Juggernaut will be unstoppable since it will orbit above the atmosphere, thus avoiding lightning bolts and their 3 points of damage.
Keeping
we want to retain an overview, for example, of ocean water quality, of greenhouse gases or temperature distribution in the atmosphere, and to be able to establish the extent to which tropical forests are being cut down
I see statistics about this every day in the newspaper. Clearly, we can measure all these things from the ground - what does a satellite give us? Is it just there for the global view?
SCIAMACHY shows the consequences of forest fires, industrial emissions, arctic haze, dust storms and volcanic eruptions.
Whatever gases get released into the atmosphere, stay in the atmosphere. Big news.
Once their presence is identified from space, poisonous algae can be prevented from spreading
Help me understand why anyone cares enough about poisonous algae to send a satellite into space.
So in order to get some answers, I went to the satellite's web page and found myself overwhelmed by the amount of incomprehensible information. The page is basically a sales portal for scientists who want to buy the data, but doesn't give any information comprehensible to a little layman like me.
So, does anyone have a good source that will explain to me why I should care one snippet about this satellite, and not think that ESA just blew E2.3 billion on the world's biggest piece of space debris?
Ceci n'est pas une sig
Computers came from Europe (England).
as did demorcosy (Greece)
and keyless encryption (England again, ok she hid it under her pillow but thats not the point[1])
...
Insightful but Overrated Troll
More like useful military satellites necessary for defense (the result of money taken from private pockets by the govenment... and put into space)
The Europeans can't even launch a man into orbit without the help of the Americans or Russians. Weak-ass Eurotrash.
Umm could someone tell me how big a juggernaut is?
Plenty of icebergs up there. You might know of a famous one called Halley....
How did you find out about the Mars colony?
(HST), the first large orbital optical observatory. Built from 1978 to 1990 at a cost of $1.5 billion
HST Programs & STS-82 Costs
Servicing Mission Costs - HST
NICMOS 105
STIS 125
GS 8
Other Flight Hardware 35
Simulators/Testing 46
Ops/Software Development 28
Total 347 Million
Servicing Mission Costs - Shuttle
Nominal Shuttle Flight Costs
448 Million
All the above are in USD
Source - http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/gsfc/service/gallery/fac
I've found 3 sizes of Juggernaut, other than this stuff from Magic the Gathering. One definition has a Juggernaut being the size of a truck. The X-Men's Juggernaut is the size of Hulk Hogan. Yet another definition equates it to Krishna, a sort of man-sized smurfcolored dude.
As someone else pointed out, this is a pretty touchy-feely press release, and it makes this Juggernaut of a satellite sound like one of Brautigan's "machines of loving grace." Everyone should be happy except for the "bad" algae, eh?
The hyperbole surrounding its data gathering rate (a dozen PC hard disks per day? Whoa! Any particular PC?) seems to lay groundwork for justifying not releasing received data until it has been 'reduced' to datasets fit for public consumption, and flawed or unexpected data has been filtered out. I'd assume pretty rapid turnaround of at least some of the data, though, if they're going to be predicting avalanches and mudslides worldwide.
Is my paranoia showing? Would you tell me if it were?
as was not aware the states have done any of that ;-)
ok, so were behind, but atlest were doing something...
Insightful but Overrated Troll
Big Macs and Julia Roberts came from America.
Let's see... a dozen "hard disks" of data per hour might be 100-150 GB of data on an extremely conservative estimate.
This is a LOT of data. More data than (I would think at least) would be useful for environmental monitoring. Especially taking bandwidth into consideration for transmitting all or some of this data back to earth.
I'm sure the designers have scientific uses in mind, but I'm wondering how powerful the spy capabilities of this beast would be... imagine how closely, for example, you could look on a 150 GB jpeg of the earth. (I know this figure doesn't apply to the jpeg images, but it's still the same order of magnitude of data resolution). And it supposedly takes 3 days of such data collection to make a map of the earth, so it's like an 11 terabyte map of the earth. I also wonder who is getting access to the information collected by it!
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted.
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
Are Americans supposed to envy this "juggernaut" or is it the product of somebody covetingly looking at somebody else's manned space program?
I kid because I love... the acronym for the American missile shield will probably be just a couple of letters away from spelling "arrogance". It's all very unfortunate...
sig semper tyrannis!
Google is second rate; logically incapable of an exact phrase search.
Only the Germans would come up with an acronym of nine letters. And it looks liks they'll be the only people able to pronounce it ;)
Ski-A-Marquis ?
"Free software as in beer, copy protection as in racket" - Telsa Gwynne
Will all the information that this is collecting be available to the public through a website? I'm sure many Universities and public schools would love to have this information and I am sure a lot of the general public would be interested as well.
Scientists: Analyze data
Special Interest Lobbyists: Point out that at least one scientist somewhere thinks that the changes may not be due to human activity
Politicians: Heeding lobbyists, maintain status quo
Net Results: Nothing
It can see which newspaper you're reading when you are sitting on the toilet. It can examine the contents of your hard drive from miles out in space, and re-arrange your files so you can't find anything. Oh yeah, and it can shoot down nuclear warheads and probably play a mean game of CS.
I've never heard of so many diverse sensors placed in the same package, it seems somewhat ridiculous at first glance. I'm sure there is a scientific reason for it, but launching that big boy isn't going to be easy I'm sure.
__ No registration required to read this message. They did it in the Matrix.
We had this same sort of baloney going on in the 1970s, but then the latest fad was global COOLING.
Net results: nothing. Sure beats wasting time to alter something no one knows anything about. We should point this thing upward to find more faces on Mars or something.
dictionary entry:
Main Entry: juggernaut
Pronunciation: 'j&-g&r-"not, -"nät
Function: noun
Etymology: Hindi JagannAth, literally, lord of the world, title of Vishnu
Date: 1841
1 chiefly British : a large heavy truck
2 : a massive inexorable force, campaign, movement, or object that crushes whatever is in its path
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
With a thing of this size, it should be visible by the naked eye, right? I really like astronomy, but I've never gotton too much into it. Could I spot this thing with binoculars if that thing makes it into space?
Um, this is my sig.
...what do they plan to do with this data? Where are they going to store it all at, it also seems to me that this is way to much data for scientists to process in detail in any resonable amount of time.
Are Euro at the same exchange rate as Canadian money? If so thats like three fiddy these days. What a bargain!
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
This is the link to the ENVISAT website
most americans know what a juggernaut is but this one I really had to look up.
Main Entry: lorry
Pronunciation: 'lor-E, 'lär-
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural lorries
Etymology: origin unknown
Date: 1908
chiefly British : MOTORTRUCK
What utter tripe!! At last count there were a mere 25 people on Euromars. BTW Just how big is a juggernaut anyway?
the size of a juggernaut
Is that an African or a European juggernaut?
How big is a juggernaut anyways? Is it bigger or smaller then a cosmonaut? How about an astronaut?
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
How much damage is this 'monster satellite' going to do when it finally dies and comes crashing down to earth?
"And in the afternoon, light showers of plutonium followed by rain.."
Perhaps the Monster Satellite should keep watch over Japan, since that's where Godzilla attacks most. I haven't heard of European monsters; none visible from space anyway.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
Isn't it a bit risky to put all their eggs in one basket? What happens when a micrometeorite punctures a few instruments and renders an important part useless and the satellite nonfunctional? Scary thought. KingPrad
Stop the Slashdot Effect! Don't read the articles!
Uh, maybe you mean "the size of a dreadnaught". A juggernaut is a force, not a unit of size. A dreadnaut is a type of battleship, a thing that is very large indeed. I don't normally get into dictionary nitpicking, but this isn't a misspelling...it's a completely wrong word.
juggernaut (jgr-nôt)
n.
Something, such as a belief or institution, that elicits blind and destructive devotion or to which people are ruthlessly sacrificed.
An overwhelming, advancing force that crushes or seems to crush everything in its path: "It doesn't assume that people need necessarily remain passive when confronted by what appears to be the juggernaut of history" (Christopher Lehmann-Haupt).
Juggernaut Used as a title for the Hindu deity Krishna.
dreadnought (drdnôt)
n. A battleship armed with six or more guns having calibers of 12 inches or more.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
but if its real purpose is spying, would they really let on about its true bandwidth capabilities? Methinks not.
And of course if they lie, simply while the true flourishes they would be in threat.
(reporter) Q: Why the real data storage capability of ENVISAT has been hindered?
(minister) A: Some transcriptions of measuring calculations hadn't correct.
Q: Who's the responsible or responsibles by this error?
A: We believe that the miscorrect information came from a typo, combined with additional errors doing the calculations, and thus, the mistaken result.
I thought the days of the volkswagon sized scientific satellite was a thing of the past.
With the price-tag that this thing has, I hope it doesn't become another reason to launch multiple, cheaper/smaller sattelites to do the same thing.
With the track record of launch vehicles lately, I'd be a bit apprehensive to put that much money on the end of a roman candle.
*puts on lead underwear*
-- This post (c) 2003, Knights who say Ni, LTD.
A few weeks ago I was talking to one of the techies responsible for the database control and he said everything is stored on 1TB of solid state space. Apparantly part of the backup system was coded by (you guessed it) Micro$oft!
;)
Any bets on when this $2.3 billion satelite's computer system crashes, taking down guidance with it and sending the whole thing into a free fall to plummet down to earth? Hey, maybe it will hit Redmond...
I'm a minister!
click here for troll pix!
Instead of putting 10 instruments on one satellite they should put two instruments one each of 5 satellites (or 3.33 instruments on each of 3). That way if one blows up on launch you haven't lost 2.3 billion euros (about 2 billion US dollars, compared with say $200-300 million or so for NASA's recent science missions, e.g. to Mars).
- The data volume for our instrument was a mere 5 GB per 100 minutes orbit, hence approx. 3 GB/hour. This instrument is considered as low-volume for data size, the bigger instrument having approx. two orders of magnitude more data!
- The design of a satellite such as ENVISAT takes years. It is true that today, one would probably design things differently. Ah, how easy it would be to know 5 years in advance how a system should be designed...
- This satellite is purely for civilian usage, no spying or whatever. All results will be available to buy (or download for low-resolution images). If ENVISAT would have military aspects, I would certainly not be allowed to talk about it freely on
/.
- All data analysis software was developed in C++. It runs on IBM AIX clusters, but with the goal of being UNIX platform agnostic. No Linux (yet?), sorry, but many open source components were used. ESA is paranoid about vendor lock-up.
Must I add that it was fun to work on such a project?it's a weather satellite. cool stuff.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Natural data also tends to compress quite well due to natural gradients rather than random fluctutations. It wouldn't surprise me if a quick, lossless, on-the-fly compression scheme would crunch the data to 1/10 to 1/100 the original size (LZW would probably work perfectly well).
So, I'll bet it would be pretty easy to fit an hour of data into 1 "hard drive" (whatever they mean by that).
Oh, I should also mention that we're not told of the format that they store the data. For all we know, they are storing all their images as 32-bit text PPM (horribly inefficient).
I assume this data rate is decoded, not the raw telemetry, which is quite useless. Lets see.
The 'housekeeping data' of a satellite contains thousands of satellite parameters, e.g. orbital position, currents, voltages, radiation level, temperatures, what is on/off, status of each instrument. On many scientific satellites, all this affects the performance of all instruments. Often the HK data is recorded once per a few seconds.
This is because when voltage across some critical part is raising, you have to shut the satellite down. Then, from the last set of HK data, you have to fig out what is wrong, and correct or shut down the dangerous part, and still have a 90% functional satellite.
Lets assume you have of the order 10000 parameters to monitor, and the values are recorded 15 times/minute. Assume each values takes five bytes when decoded (including a STRING for parameter name. The raw telemetry will of course be more compact). This gives 10000x15x60x24x5 bytes/day, or about 1 GB/day, just to know the satellite is OK.
Now, add the HK, calibration and science data for each instrument. I have analyzed some data from satellite X-ray instruments, so I use it as a crude estimate. (This is very crude, other instruments may be completely different) A modern X-ray instrument produces about 1GB/hour in decoded data (instrumental HK, calibration, science). Thus,we have about 20 GB/day/instrument. I haven't bothered to read the article, but I assume the satellite contains about half a dozen instruments.
This would produce about 100 GB/day. Problem solved.
A clear sign of penis envi...
You have been living a lie: Holland is a province in the Netherlands. Most people around the world use it incorrectly: it's a bit like people saying "England" and meaning "Great Britain".
...and of course, I can correct my own post immediately because one shoudn't say "Great Britain", but the correct name nowadays is "United Kingdom". My excuses to all inhabitants of the UK :-)
They know where you live there is no escape evryone in Europe give a wave up at the sky, your masters are watching you.
We invented the word in 1908 to respond to the world shortage of tongue-twisters there was at the time.
(Red lorry, yellow lorry) * 10
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
What is demorcosy?
It's not beowulf and not of these satellites
:-)
but it's a cluster:
http://sci.esa.int/cluster/
SCNR
Welja, dat komt ervan als je aardrijkskunde wat verroest is
Help me understand why anyone cares enough about poisonous algae to send a satellite into space.
I live a few miles from the ocean. The last red tide we had was fairly severe. People would drive to the beach communities and start coughing and hacking as soon as they got out of their cars. A few friends went surfing before anyone knew it was a red tide, and had severe symptoms, including bleeding eyes and sinuses.
With a birds eye view, it is possible not only to get early warning of these events, but to figure out what causes them - are they linked to temperature, sediment loads, particular nutrients, or what?? Anyone like seafood?? Knowing more about the where and when of algae will improve the safety and quality of fish in your local market.
How about the USA, we kinda created that.
I didn't say it was your fault. I said I was going to blame it on you.
How about the USA, we kinda created that.
Yes, and that was one of our biggest mistakes. Just take a look what it has developed to.
Is that American standard billion 1*10^9 or is it British Billion 1*10^12 ? Those little zeros mean more than you think when they start holding places. (Kinda like George W.B.)
I can not understand why so many people continue to be taken in by the global warming/cooling scam. My only supposition is that, faced with the realization that man has essentially no impact on the universe at large, it become vitally important for them to believe that at least they are having a major impact on the earth. The fact that we are still minor players in the biosphere (there are, for example, well over a metric ton of termites per human, and termites are minor players among the insects. The insects, in turn, are dwarfed by the plant kingdom,...) is evidently so scary to them that they simply can't accept it.
-- MarkusQ
-- MarkusQ
Is rocket fuel suddenly good for the environment? Aren't they concerned about congestion around our planet? Can't they get all of this information from the ground? The tree-huggers who put this thing up probably drove to the launch site in their SUV's! You can bet this satellite will be used to spy on corporations and individuals. Before too long we will be getting notices in the mail saying we are using too much lighter fluid on our backyard barbeques!!!
~ The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
> Landing men on the moon
Faked
Insightful but Overrated Troll
Since, every time this is mentioned, independent thinkers here a slashdot crow about how foolish the concept of global warming is, here are some posts of mine from kuro5hin awhile ago on the same topic, with several pertient links to actual, real, evidence for the matter at hand. Enjoy, sand-heads:
--Stating that long-term climate change can't be known from short-term calculations is dosen't prove or disprove anything. If you are going to try and disprove climate change, look at all the evidence that's been collected first, and look at the theoretical side of the argument. I'll give a short summery of what I know of each now; I'll try and get some links to back myself up by tonight and post them as a reply to this.
Areas of Evidence for climate change:The general areas of evidence for climate change, as I know them, are
It's the last one, measurment of atmosphereic chemical content through drill-cores of permanent ice (in areas having very long term ice formations - Greenland, the Antarctic region, and so forth) which you have failed to mention, and which give some of the most compelling evidence yet - due to the informaiton's long-term charecteristics - of global climate change. What is derived from such measurments (as I said, I'll post some links tonight) is that the CO2 content in the atmosphere is now - i.e. in the last 100 or so years - increasing at a rate not seen since the last major global temperature change. What gives this evidence it's added weight is both the fact that it isn't limited to the last 100, 50, or 20 years; rather, the body of informaiton extends over thousands, tens of thousand, or more years. The other methods of measurment, too, give some proof of short-term temerpature change; further, their body of evidence, though short-term, does demonstrate three things which are not of negligable importance. First, that the temperatures measured are fluctuating, though in which direction I (under the assumption that what you have written is mostly truthful) cannot say. Second, that there that these fluctuations are occuring on a global scale. Their global scale, and their simple fluctuation - with the best sensors we have - demonstrate that there is someting happening, though exactly what cannot be known from that. Thirdly, the changes occuring are demonstrating a pattern to their change, and have been for as long as measurments have been taken. These last ten years, keep in mind, have been the warmest past ten years on record (or so I've been told more than once, though I will - as I said - get some links to back this up); further, each of these past ten years has been warmer than the previous year.
The theory of global warmingDespite the number and the justification of the questions concerning the current consensus on global warming, these arguments given have rested on questioning the evidence of the warming. What hasn't yet been addressed is the theory behind global warming. Just as CFCs were considered to be dangerous because of a theory which saw them as such, there is a method to the (to some, apparent) madness of the people who see warming as a threat. That is that C02 is a greehouse gas - i.e. the level of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is corelated to the amount of solar radiation kept within the atmosphere of a given planet. Given this, and given that there is ample evidence that humans have been releasing - through the conversion of petrochemicals into mechanical energy - the dormant CO2 from the earth's crust into the earth's atmosphere - leads to the contention that humans are having some effect on the environment through the activites of our civilization. The only thing left to question, so long as the theory of CO2 being a greehouse gas and the contention that humans have been releasing it into the earth's atmosphere are not disproven by some unaccounted for or unmeasured piece of evidence, is the scale of the change. Given what I stated above (i.e. that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere has been seen to be increasing at it's greatest level, year over year, in an extremely long time, leads one to conclude that there is a significant possibility that humans have, or will have, some direct influence on the average temperature of the earth's atmosphere and surface. Given that a large proportion of the accessable petrochemicals have already been used, and thus that a significant proprtion of the dormant CO2 in the earth has been released into the atmosphere, I would then put forth that there is at least some cause for concern around this issue. Given, further, that there are methods by which we can now reduce, if we so desired as a population, our CO2 output, I see no compelling reason why we should not do that.
----Links to sources w/ comment: http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2001/3/2/03449/2
The reason why they can't just measure this from the ground is simple. You can't put a measuring station everywhere. This thing can look over the whole planet and get data. I work on a project that is involved in the global change of ozone. We use balloon flights, ground based instruments (Dobsons, Lidars etc) and TOMS on Satellites. Dobsons give us the best data, but they can only measure it in a vertical column above us, with satellites, we can get the data for the whole globe (excluding areas of polar darkness). That can be much more useful that point based satellites, and it also gives us a much better picture of the ozone hole. We couldn't do that with ground-based instruments.
Does anyone else think this bad boy is going to crash and burn somewhere in the atlantic?
"Inside every short man is a tall amn doubled over in extreme pain.."