“We can measure that distance of each individual photon traveling inside the snow,” says Hu, a researcher at NASA’s Langley Research Center.Just as an ant wanders around its underground colony, a photon shot from a space laser takes a random route through the snow.

For a forest, one way to track resiliency is through a satellite measurement called vegetation optical depth, or VOD, which penetrates through the canopy and detects how much woody biomass there is.

Basically, any kind of good or bad weather, any kind of hazardous environmental condition, the cameras on GOES-T will see them,” says Pamela Sullivan, director of the GOES-R program at the the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration, which together with NASA designed and built the new satellite.

Today Wood is the director of the Space Enabled research group at MIT’s Media Lab, and she was part of a team that just published their findings in the journal Frontiers in Climate, showing how Earth observation technologies can map and monitor hard-to-reach areas to inform local decisionmaking—specifically on how Beninese groups are tackling the hyacinth problem with data from satellites, drones, and sensors in the lake.

Could the solution to eliminating dangerous space junk be a mini-fridge-sized spacecraft equipped with a big magnet, or maybe an orbiting tug that sends out a swarm of tentacles to trap a spent rocket?

A new study from a Jet Propulsion Laboratory group led by Társilo Girona highlights the possibility that presently available satellite data could provide an entirely new way to warn of eruptions .Heat is obviously a relevant parameter for volcanic activity, but it can be quite variable at the individual spots where you might set up a thermometer.

Researchers are using centuries-old British sea charts and advanced technology, such as camera drones and satellite images, to trace shifts in the abundance and distribution of kelp beds over time, said geographer Maycira Costa.

Photograph: Jakob AssmannThat’s because perhaps a third of the carbon stored in the soils of the world is in the Arctic permafrost—essentially frozen dirt.

The film doesn’t have footage of Laika suffering in space (thank God) but it does have plenty of clips of scientists putting Laika and a few other research dogs through a barrage of exercises—they spin in a centrifuge, dazed—and subjecting them to invasive, gruesome surgeries in order to rig them up with the necessary sensors to see how long they’d last alone above the planet’s atmosphere.

Satellite images have revealed 11 previously unknown emperor penguin colonies in Antarctica, boosting the number of known colonies of the imperilled birds by 20 percent.Philip Trathan, also at BAS, said: “The new breeding sites are all in locations where recent model projections suggest emperor penguins will decline.

This week, WIRED broke the news of a Russian military intelligence hacking campaign that dates all the way back to December 2018.

These days, Al-Amiri is quarantining near the Tanegashima Space Center in Japan, where Hope is expected to depart on a seven-month journey to the Red Planet next week.“Thankfully, the most critical tests were done before the pandemic started, because two days after the team flew in, Japan imposed a two-week quarantine.”.

It’s the worst Saharan dust event the island has seen in 15, maybe 20 years, says Olga Mayol-Bracero, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Puerto Rico.

Each sector comes with its own unique dynamics: Air traffic has of course plummeted, but that industry only accounts for 3 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions in a normal year.

But the real star of the show is a small solar panel developed by the physicists at the Naval Research Lab that will be used to conduct the first orbital experiment with space-based solar power.

Now a handful of companies are working to fix this problem by building satellites that can connect to regular cell phones and provide high-bandwidth mobile data anywhere on earth.

For OneWeb, the global adoption of space-based internet is critical to the company’s existence; for SpaceX, it is key to funding Elon Musk’s Mars ambitions .Both companies put their first satellites into orbit last year, but 2020 is when things will get serious.

“Once you go to space, you can throw your object, and it will be in free fall for a long time,” says physicist Aurélien Hees of the Paris Observatory, a member of the team.

Excite was flung into space courtesy of a company called NovaWurks, which makes “satlets.” The suffix—like that of “piglets”—implies littleness, and indeed these 14 satlets are smaller than a standard piece of paper and only a few inches thick.

Milano, who helps run the Space Sciences Laboratory at UC Berkeley, had been gearing up for a satellite launch.Normally, NASA wouldn’t let mission control run on anything less than a stable grid connection, says Steven Beckwith, the lab’s director.

Thousands of GM workers are on strike, a bug exposed the popular password manager LastPass, and the Air Force is daring hackers to take down an orbiting satellite.You can sign up right here to make sure you get the news delivered fresh to your inbox every weekday!

The fiery, anti-environment populist has encouraged settlements in the Amazon region, sacked the head of the government agency that monitors deforestation from space, and just this week blamed NGOs for setting the fires to make him look bad.On Tuesday, a satellite took this image of forest fires burning across three Brazilian states.

Momentus will be one of the first to find out: The company announced today that its tug will launch aboard SpaceX’s first SmallSat Rideshare mission, sending a few customers to the Charlottes of space.

Dr Schmidt, who is also the New Zealand representative for the World Meteorological Organization’s Global Climate Observing System, said the international science community was working with governments to protect radio frequencies vital to earth observations.

FaceApp isn't alone in the land of privacy concerns, a curious week-long satellite outage for Europe has finally ended, and WIRED did the math on what it would take to bike to the moon. Europe's week-long satellite outage is over—but serves as a warning.

As Buhler, Feldmann and I talked through the details of Metop-B’s routine, I could appreciate the satellite as a busy working instrument, watching the atmosphere as attentively as any earthbound weather station.

“We literally sat in a room next to a plastic jug of it when we were fueling the satellite,” says Chris McLean, an engineer at Ball Aerospace and the project lead on NASA’s Green Propellant Infusion Mission.

As a satellite internet operator, one of SpaceX’s biggest challenges will be differentiating itself from other broadband constellations that will be operating in low Earth orbit, says Roger Rusch, president of TelAstra, a consulting firm that advises investors in the satellite industry.

According to the release put out by the Nevada Museum of Art, after the satellite was deployed it successfully established communication with ground stations on Earth, but the sheer number of satellites being deployed meant the Air Force was “unable to distinguish between [the satellites] and could not assign tracking numbers to many of them.” Without a NORAD tracking ID, the FCC wouldn’t give the okay to Paglen’s team to deploy the reflective balloon contained in the satellite.

Two small satellites, whirling through Earth's low orbits, had “the potential for a conjunction.” Those are the words Major Cody Chiles, spokesperson for the Joint Force Space Component Command, uses to mean "the chance of a collision." The satellites, one from a company called Capella Space and the other from Spire Global, could smack into each other.