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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)."
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.
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?
(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
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.
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
Speaking of the 70s, what ever happened to the Population Bomb?
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
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.
And yes, we are all watching you! Its all about you. You are so amazingly interesting that we, as taxpayers, are funding programs and supporting political leaders that focus in on your every move.
INSOC Forever!
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
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
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.
Why?
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.
Idiots:
The fact that AMERICAN politicians do nothing about SCIENTIFIC DATA from satellites and other sources is a travesty. Global warming DOES exist. I trust the opinions of over 90 Nobel Laureats over at FAS and the over than 150 countries signing the Kyoto protocol (the US being the only country to back out) than your pig-headed "patriotic" asses.
About the population situation:
A bomb is an inadequate metaphor for the population crisis. Basically it boils down to this: recent population expansion is a result of oil, and when the oil runs out (predicted mid-21st century), then the energy wont be there to support the civilization it fostered. Humanity will then regress in what will probably be a messy scramble for resources.
You can see that commercial oil usage and mining began in the mid 19th century, approximately when the population started booming. Oil is the foundation for mechanical and electrical energy necessary for industry, farming, and communication, which creates a positive feedback loop with science and medicine, thus progressing population growth through lower mortality, higher birth rate, and more food.
The special thing about oil is that the payoff in energy is so much higher than the amount you put in to harvest it, unlike most other renewable sources.
A good analogy for our present situation: Imagine humans are extinct through some virus. Somewhere in mid-california there are huge werehouses of packaged food. A small pack of bears, say 50, finds this werehouse and begins to sustain themselves on it. After a few generations, there are 5000 bears. Then the food runs out. What happens to the bears?
We are the bears, and the the food is oil. But we are different. We have brains and can figure out how to lower our energy usage and/or find new sources. But we only have 50 years.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
- 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
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.
You have been living a lie: Holland is a province in the Netherlands.
Not quite.
Actually it is two provinces :
north- and south holland.
But there is a plan to put the two provinces together.
And then there is only Holland.
This doesn't have any effect on the other 10 provinces.
We know how governments love to spy anything, include the internet we're using.
Please don't forget this SAT was endorsed by European governments
Which doesn't spent a dime on spying.
Why should they.
The biggest difference between the US and the EC is that we don't waste as much money on the military as the US.
Healthcare, education and work are more important than wasting money on military crap.
I don't think "pretentious" and "pedantic" are a good fit as while they're close, they don't specifically relate to the assumption that one knows everything. "Sophomoric" on the other hand is perfect. I completely forgot about that word! The OED definition is good, but Merriam-Webster's really shows how it relates to many recent slashdot posts:
...
sophomoric, adj, 1 : conceited and overconfident of knowledge but poorly informed and immature
I vote for a new moderation category: (-1, Sophomoric).
- j
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
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.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
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