VENUS Satellite, The Next Eye in the Sky

Erica Campbell writes "According to IsraCast, Israel and France are working together on a new micro-satellite called VENUS, which is supposed to be far more advanced then present satellites. VENUS, which will be launched in 2008, will carry a unique Super Spectral Space Camera, and will have an advanced plasma-thruster engine for propulsion. From the article: 'The Israeli-French project will allow farmers to better treat their crops, fisherman to locate large quantities of fish in mid-sea and will also vastly increase the ability of the scientific community to study and monitor the flora and fauna in many areas around the globe.'"

Comments

Re:Apartheid

[packetmill]

You are right. How can anyone possibly not believe that Israel will not use a unique opportunity like this to help it pick targets for assasinations..etc. It would be interesting, however, to find out if the French can see whatever the Israelis are peeking at, or how many imaging devices/cameras are on that thing.

Hopefully this will humiliate NASA to catch up

[couch_warrior]

Having worked with NASA in the near past on a satellite project, I was amazed at the positively ANTIQUE technology they throw into space. Their engineers are mostly in their 50's and 60's and they got their EE degrees before PCs were invented. They build satellites using hundreds of millions of dollars worth of custom-designed discrete component logic, when the same functions could be performed hundreds of times faster and more reliably with integrated circuits for a small fraction of the cost. They still build earth-sensing satellites with individual photodiodes and reciprocating mirrors instead of CCD arrays. The failure of a single transistor took out a whole spectral band (one of twelve) on one recent bird. When Golden tried to get them to do things "cheaper, faster, and better" they sabotaged his programs by cutting out testing and QA, blew up a few probes, and then started saying "That's what happens when you try to save money!" They pay a team of half a dozen scientists to sit around and periodically analyze the response curve of the photodiodes to look for drift in intensity, when the entire function could be done more accurately by a simple feedback and control loop.
The whole place should be cleaned out and re-staffed from scratch.