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)."

Comments

Cost of the HST

[DAldredge]

(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/fact _sheets/spacesci/hst-cost.htm

Re:I wonder...

[deglr6328]

says here that:

"The on-board recording system is composed of two solid state recorders (SSR) with 70 Gbits capacity each, and one tape recorder (TR), 30 Gbits capacity as back up for low rate data recording."

It's about halfway down the page.

Re:Umm, okay.

[Rasta Prefect]

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?

Actually, most of these things are already gathered from satellites in one form or another. This satellite gives more extensive, detailed data that many of the others that are already in existence. Nothing extremely groundbreaking but serious improvements in a number of areas.

Whatever gases get released into the atmosphere, stay in the atmosphere. Big news.

Actually, no, this is just plain wrong. Gases and materials are continually being added and removed from our atmosphere. Oxygen is removed by animal life and combustion. Carbon Dioxide is removed by plant life and the oceans, as well as various geological processes. Various emissions created by industrial processes are removed by rain (I.E, acid rain). CFC's work their way up into the upper atmosphere over time and destroy Ozone. Our understanding of all of these processes is incomplete. So we need more detailed data. This satellite gathers that data.

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.

Hmmm. Gee, I can't imagine why anyone would care about huge masses of poisonous algae. It kills of fish, it kills off other aquatic life. It affects fishing, which for many people is an extremely important source of food. It effects the chemical composition the ocean, and in turn how the ocean interacts with the atmosphere.

So in order to get some answers, I went to the satellite's web page [esa.int] 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.

Incomprehensible? To you maybe. If you really want to know go do a little research on google for some of the topics mentioned in the article. Yes, the site you linked to is in fact designed for scientists. Why should everything be spoon fed to your level of ignorance? If you want to know, go educate yourself.

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?

Yes, now that you mention it Micheal kindly provided a link to it at the top of the page. This satellite is exceptional only in it's size. If you can't logically reason out why those sorts of data might be useful, well google is your friend.

First-hand information

[Pascal Sartoretti]

I was the project manager for the ground-level processor of one of the instrument (AATSR if you really want to know which one), so I think that I can provide first-hand information:

• 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?

Re:Spy capabilities

[Anonymous Coward]

First, JPEG is lossy - not good for scientific purposes.

Also, 150GB isn't all that much for environmental data of the entire globe, probably down to the square mile. The Earth has ~200 million square miles of surface area. That leaves about 750KB of data per square mile. Let's round this up to a Megabyte.

Monitoring environmental data also isn't just about taking pictures of cloud conditions. There are several types of imagery that they might record: weather patterns, air temperature, sea temperature, ozone levels, etc.

If you can fit a square mile of this kind of information into a megabyte, I'd be very, very impressed. Oh, wait - make that 750K.

Re:An excellent outcome

[Galvatron]

Good point. Same thing that happened to Malthas: technology keeps improving. Malthas claimed (in the 1800's! Remember Scrooge's quip about "surplus population?") that while our ability to grow food grows linearly, population grows exponentially. Hence, we will soon run out of food. Of course, technology continued to outstrip population growth, resulting in present day farm subsidies, because food is "too abundant."

Another historical note. Ever heard of the "London fog?" Wonder why it doesn't get mentioned anymore? Because it was actually smog. The earth is tremendously cleaner today, compared to 100 years ago, and gets more so all the time.

Re:Damn, that's cheap!

[WoOS]

No. That was the case 30 years ago- but the american usage has been universally adopted since then, atleast in all papers, government announcements and everyday usage; and the dictionaries indicate that also.

It's somewhat OT, but the american use of billion has not been adopted universially. Maybe in the english speaking countries but at least in Germany it's still the good old: Million (10e6) - Milliarde (10e9) - Billion (10e12) - Billiarde (10e15) - Trillion (10e18) - ... . This way you get much more bang for your -uhm- billion ;-)
I guess that's what Erik meant.