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

One Fine Day In Provence

[ackthpt]

Sez a French Farmer: "Mon dieu! I feel like I am being watched by a goddess on a mountain top!"

Sez a Fisherman: "Mais oui! It is like I can feel her crystal eyes burning into the back of my head!"

oo-er

[telchine]

plasma-thruster engine

Am I the only person that giggled when reading that

Re:oo-er

[whitehatlurker]

Possibly ;-) However, I almost spit coffee when I saw the caption "VENUS in the sky with ions" in the article.

Overfishing?

[cgifool]

Umm. Exactly how does this help with the global problem of overfishing?

Re:Overfishing?

[Iphtashu Fitz]

Exactly how does this help with the global problem of overfishing?

Simple. No more fish means no more fishermen. Problem Solved.

(Actually I had the exact same thought as you when I read that part of it)

Re:Overfishing?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's only a problem if you view it as a problem. Personally, I think it is an amazing technological feat that we have been able to wipe out macroscopic marine life. We've successfully invaded an entirely different habitat. I mean, imagine if fish had been able somehow to wipe out bison. I think you would have to recognize that as a pretty impressive accomplishment. Well, that's what we've done, and it is awesome if you think about it. So maybe the War on Drugs is stalled and the War on Terror is bogged down. But the War on Fish is going, ahem, swimmingly...
I celebrate by eating fresh, wild-caught fish as often as possible; you all should too if you don't want to look back in regret in 10 years from now when there's nothing left but farmed McSalmon...

For known satellites maybe

[Grant29]

which is supposed to be far more advanced then present satellites

Maybe more advanced than presently known satellites. I'm sure the government's don't release all the data...
--
Find the lowest price at PriceAge. Comparison Shopping with online coupons.

It's only for helping the farmers right?

[Noryungi]

Let's see, this thing has:

1. Advanced, high-res optical cameras.
2. Plasma thruster to change orbits.
3. Small size, for smaller radar image, and/or better survivability.

And all of this for crop surveillance? Riiiiiiiiiiiiight.

I think our good friends at the NRO are going to get some competition from... ahem... "friends and allies" or something like this. Even if I am just being paranoid, the military potential is there, and don't forget that SPOT (European space imaging project, led by France) has been denounced often by the USA as a "dual-use" project...

Re:It's only for helping the farmers right?

[Vellmont]

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.

Re:It's only for helping the farmers right?

[Seanasy]

Advanced, high-res optical cameras.

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.

wokka

[kisrael]

If other nations get jealous of the camera and jets of this sattelite, will they have a bad case of Venus-envy?

Are there any large quantities of fish left?

[under_score]

This seems like a really expensive way to address over-fishing!

NASA woes and Data policy

[Lord Satri]

This is good news especially when in light to the alarmist view of future NASA satellite projects.

For the SPOT program, the French are trying harder than the US to recover their fees. What I mean is SPOT data is not cheap when compared to NASA data (Landsat, ALI, Hyperion, etc). Yes, I know, this is different types of data, but the US has been in the past more prone to sell data at a lower price than the French. My uneducated guess is that Israel too will want to sell the data in order to cover their costs. This is just different goals: make the data available cheap and hope the advantages of massive use of data will justify the investment. That's the problem with Canada's Radarsat-1 and Radarsat-2 (not yet launched, but commercial). While Canada's Radarsat-C (launch timeframe: 2012-2014) data will be available at a minimal fee for the canadian government agencies. That said, I just hope this VENUS satellite will have a data policy which will allow widespread use of the data it collects.

Re:NASA woes and Data policy

[d-Orb]

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).

Obligatory austin powers reference

[morganix]

Dr. Evil: Our early attempts at a tractor beam went through several preparations. Preparations A through G were a complete failure. But now, ladies and gentlemen, we finally have a working tractor beam, which we shall call... Preparation H.

[Scott snickers]

Dr. Evil:

What?

Scott Evil: Why don't you just call it operation ass-cream, you ass.

Dr. Evil: I'm sorry, did you say you want some ice cream?

Scott Evil: Yes, I'd love some chocolate ass-cream.

Dr. Evil: Perhaps later.

Number 2: Dr. Evil, I love your plan.

Dr. Evil: You do?

Frau Farbissina: YAH. IT'S A REALLY GOOD PLAN!

Dr. Evil: Yes Frau, on the whole Preparation H feels good.

[Scott resumes snickering]

Dr. Evil: What is it now?

Scott Evil: No, I totally agree with you. Preparation H does feel good... on the hole.

Poor Naming

[dreemernj]

Of all the things they could have named a dot in the sky after, they had to go and name it after an existing dot in the sky.

Then/Than!

[Resident Netizen]

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/than.html

Jeez, kids, this ain't no third grade book report! /grammar nazi mode = off

In that respect, I wish them bad luck

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Fish Location may lead to Fish Extinction

[digitaldc]

'The Israeli-French project will allow farmers to better treat their crops, fisherman to locate large quantities of fish in mid-sea...'

There is already a threat of illegal fishing on the high seas, I only see this as being detrimental to the ocean environment.
This article states, 'Over half of the global fish stocks are already fully exploited, and 25 percent are overexploited, depleted or recovering from depletion.'
A better use would be to locate and protect certain species from depletion.

But the real question is, does anyone care? Or will they only care when it is too late to do anything about it?

The hunt is on!

[agent0range_]

..fisherman to locate large quantities of fish in mid-sea...

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.

Re:This is just funny, it had me laughing.

[fighthairloss]

Ok I'll bite.

Yes, it's funny to think "oh suuure... it's for farmers and fishermen".

It's a whole different thing to let go of the humor and objectively state "we all know what it's really for".

I don't know what it's for. I don't know satellites and satellite designs, so I would ask questions such as:

- what kind of equipment do different types of spy satellites carry?
- what kind of orbits do they use to maximize the results of their missions?
- how heavy are they due to the kinds of equipment they have to carry?
- do these satellites in question fit the profile of anything we've described above?

Ok, if you have evidence or some observations about the nature of satellites and how you think this might be more than it's being touted as, let's see it so we can all make a better decision.

Otherwise, no, we don't "all know what this satellite will be used for..."

Hi-Tech

[DanTheLewis]

"... will carry a unique Super Spectral Space Camera, and will have an advanced plasma-thruster engine for propulsion."

Super Spectral Space Camera? That's nothing. The US is putting up a really unique Super Dog Duper Spectral Space Camera on its next Awesomely Rad Surveillance Satellite.

I guess they went with plasma thrusters because they couldn't get the Hyperexploding Fusion Containment Rockets done in time.

Re:Hi-Tech

[fanblade]

I, for one, welcome our new Super Spectral Space Camera wielding, advanced plasma-thruster engine driving Israeli-French overlords.

Then != than

[Ludedude]

Morons.

Poor farmers...

[luder]

Actually, this will make life harder for the average farmer. Now they can't even have any intimate moment with their sheeps without feeling somebody's watching...

It's just like night vision in Iraq.

Eye in the sky

[jamesjw]

Regarding the Austin Powers reference above, and the title in the article.. one cant forget the Alan Parsons Project "Laser" joke.. and Eye in the sky was a song and album name for Alan Parsons Project..

Umm..

Okay so I was stretching for humor there..

--Jim.