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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)."
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.
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?
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
Blah blah blah. If you can't stand it any longer, do something about. Lobby the government, run for president, organize a protest, start a revolution, whatever.
Whining on slashdot isn't going to help
Most of the users will get the data for free, that's how ESA work. Comercial users pay for it (and cheap it ain't). And as to how much data it creates, well, I work at a distribution centre for Envisat; we only supply 1/3 of the data and 320 terabytes of online storage gives us 9 months worth of data. Users can order the data they want in the format they want (CR, tape, FTP). You could download directly from the bird, but you'd need some impressive kit (which we have), the bandwidth is HUGE.