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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.'"
Umm. Exactly how does this help with the global problem of overfishing?
This seems like a really expensive way to address over-fishing!
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
There are nations with zero sense of responsibility for sustaining the fish stock. The fact that they are members of the EU, and the EU stands up for them, is a black mark on the EU. How about the ability to pinpoint Spanish fishing trawlers so Greenpeace can more effectively harass them.
Soon there will be no place for our piscine enemies to hide! We will hunt them to the ends of the earth! Fuck the planet!
Poor guys just can't catch a break... Soon the only food source left will be people.
I think our good friends at the NRO are going to get some competition from... ahem... "friends and allies"
You should stop being so paranoid. Where in the article does it say that it has a high resolving power? It's my understanding that you need large mirrors to get a good angular resolution. Large mirrors don't fit so well in a micro-satellite. This this is designed to have extremely good color vision, not the high angular resolution you want for a spy satellite. It'd be interesting to know the angular resolution of this thing, but my guess is that it's going to be fairly large.
Also, the Ion engine is designed to keep the thing in orbit, not change the orbit. Ion engines provide small amounts of thrust over long periods of time. Just the kind of thing you'd want to maintain an orbit, but it wouldn't be very good at changing the orbit quickly. Maybe if you had several months to wait for an orbit change. The spy satellite users usually don't have the luxury of waiting that long for changing orbits.
AccountKiller
The spatial resolution, as stated in the article, is 5.3m. Think about how big something would have to be in order for an image to show anything meaningful about it if each pixel represents 5 m^2.
Plasma thruster to change orbits.Exactly why do you think this is spooky?
Small size, for smaller radar image, and/or better survivability.Or, maybe, a small size means less weight and lower cost to orbit. But, don't let that hamper your paranoia.
Even if I am just being paranoid, the military potential is there...Where? Look at this 5m SPOT image and tell me what the military applications are when you've got 2m commercially available imagery and probably much, much better on the satellite that wasn't announced in a press release.
The problem with NASA is that NASA is science focused. ESA, on the other hand, is still thinking what they are good for. So, NASA decides that anyone should use their data for science and applications. When the technology is mature, it's up to NOAA, the USGS or whoever, to, take the technology and make commercially viable.
No ESA or NASA here, but a commercial company in the like of SPOT. These are for-profit companies, where you get to pay good money for your images. You get several tries and so on. But this is not the market we are looking at, this is so 1990 :).
Consider just the agriculture bit. France is an EU country, where things are moving from production scale, to agroenvironmental rules, water and air quality, erosion monitoring, Nitrogen limits... Israel, on the other hand, has one of the most advanced precision agricultures in the world (if not the most). We are moving from simple uses of Remote Sensing as a qualitative tool, useful for the administrations the world over, to keep tabs on things, to an end-user centric view of the world, Ideally, farmer John has a plot of land with crop A. He wants a target yield of 8 Tons/Ha. Fine. He wants to minimise fertiliser and/or irrigation (in other words, "optimise" his labouring). He gets a map in digital format for the areas which need more irrigation, more fertilisation, and so on. This map goes directly to his tractor (or probably, a tractor subcontracted for this task) in digital format, and we close the loop throwing GALILEO in. In fact, people are doing just that using SPOT images. Presently, our understanding of optica data is far more advanced than what most people think: you can invert canopy reflectance models and estimate (with a high level of accuracy) useful biophysical parameters which are then coupled into agrometeo models, and which allow a number of these things to take place. To improve this, a sensor configuration like that of VENUS (5ish meter resolution, loads of useful bands in the VIS and NIR/MIR...) are useful. You need the 5m resolution to get a swath big enough so that things start becoming economical (say, some 80km?). You no longer sell images, but products tailored to the end user. And people are doing this for 10/Ha already.
Radarsat2 is different can of fish. To start with, it is a SAR. SARs have a number of military applications, and as I understand it, it is these which are going to provide a major part of the income. Other sources are going to be civil engineering-like (land subsidence applications, natural hazards), and some of the cash will come from marine and coastal applications. End-user applications are not even half as developed for SAR as they are for optical, and until TerraSAR-X comes along in 2008ish, we won't see major shifts in this. And yes, I am a big SAR fan, and wholly looking forward to TerraSAR-X, TerraSAR-L (if it ever comes) and TandemX.
To make the difference between these VENUS people and similar American consortia, let's just say that Europe is getting ahead in the end-user part of the applications, with derived products (companies like RapidEye AG will launch a constellation of satellites in the next couple of years, and do not plan to sell imagery, but products). American commercial companies have focused more on very high resolution imagery (QuickBird et al.), small swaths. The European model is, if anything, a tribute to NASA's vision that people want "products" and not images (just Google for MODIS list of data products, and see LAI, fAPAR and other biophysical variables, derived from the images on a global scale).