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!"

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...

wokka

[kisrael]

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

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: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.