#You May Also Like Satellite Images Reveal Scope of Massive Balkans Flooding Carbon dioxide Passes Global 400 ppm Milestone Climate Change Could Warp Rails With#Sun Kinks Cold
when the sun is high so run the sprinkler when water's more likely to stay in the soil.
because it is so difficult to reach Doug Morton a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt Maryland told the Earth Observatory.
and collects high-resolution imagery that satellites in orbit just can't capture. NASA's Landsat satellites which have been snapping pictures of the Earth's surface for more than 40 years now have instruments that can produce images with 49-to 98-foot (15 to 30 m) resolutions.
But forests in Landsat images look like green paint strokes. G-Liht can produce photographs at a smaller and sharper resolution:
Health Benefits, Risks & Nutrition Facts Bananas are among the most widely consumed fruits on the planet and according to the U s. Department of agriculture Americans'favorite fresh fruit.
#NASA Video Captures Stunning Volcano Eruption View from Space On June 12 2009 the International Space station happened to be passing over the Sarychev Volcano
#CO2 Monitoring Could Be based'Space'in Future The measurement of carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants
Using satellites to measure atmospheric concentrations of climate change-fueling carbon dioxide originating from coal-fired power plants could help verify other countries claims about their emissions of greenhouse gases helping regulators in the U s
and technology satellites may use to measure carbon emissions from CO2 sources all over the globe.
The use of satellites to measure carbon emissions is called space-based verification #and it could be a way to check the accuracy of other countries claims about how much carbon they emit.
and satellite remote sensing could eventually provide accurate data that would help make it easier to enforce international emissions regulations.#
#Scientists have had technical challenges using satellites to measure greenhouse gases because of their limited coverage area
and assess future satellite monitoring strategies#he said adding that research in using satellites to monitor atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations will flourish
when NASA launches its Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 satellite in July. The Los alamos team clearly demonstrated the value of remote sensing for monitoring greenhouse gas emissions said David Crisp the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) science lead at NASA s Jet propulsion laboratory.
One way to do this is) to collect remote sensing observations from sensors deployed on space-based platforms.
#Today sensors on the ground are more accurate at measuring greenhouse gases than satellites but the OCO-2 is expected to take the next technological leap in satellite-based greenhouse gas measurement technology he said.
For CO2 emissions to be monitored accurately from space it would take a coordinated network of satellites similar to existing weather satellites he said.
That network isn t yet being built but some countries have greenhouse gas-detecting satellites being launched within the next five years.
Beyond the demonstration of possible satellite-based greenhouse gas detection technology the Los alamos study had some surprising results about the two New mexico power plant s emissions.
The study found that 70 to 75 percent of the regional atmosphere within about 6 miles of the power plants is polluted with their emissions.
You May Also Like Carbon dioxide Passes Global 400 ppm Milestone Climate Change Could Warp Rails With#Sun Kinks Cold U s. Winter Caused By Warm Tropical Waters?
I wake up every morning with good intentions wanting to help save the planet by reducing my carbon footprint.
But are scientists like myself the ones who will save the planet? I seriously doubt it
even if she can afford organic food take the time to worry about saving the planet when she barely has enough hours each day to care for her children?
and avoid being crushed by the onus of having to save the planet? China and India saw their per capita carbon emission from fossil fuel
We should be worrying about the big picture finding solutions rather than relying on the pipe dream of simply reducing consumption to save the planet.
and the planet needs saving. It is beyond doubt that we have been ramping up the carbon in land air
and water and this is increasing temperatures on our planet. If we continue down this path there is a finite probability that irreversible changes in glaciers
since the planet has shown evidence for a pause in global warming during the last 15 years.
or returning to space. Many species surely are going extinct due to the rapid warming but others are hardier than we expected.
Our loopholes may come from finding solutions to our demands for continuing our good life without destroying the planet.
and allow future generations to dream about space travel instead of fearing the end of the world due to climate change.
The infinite potential to harness the inexhaustible energy of the sun is limited only by human imagination printable solar cells
but the planet's surface is 70 percent ocean and even a more massive ocean was discovered recently deep within the earth.
American black bear Asiatic black bear brown bear giant panda bear polar bear spectacled bear sloth bear and sun bear according to the International Association for Bear Research & Management.
Sun bears have a crescent-shaped marking on their chests that looks like a rising sun. Spectacled bears also called Andean bears get their name because of the white circular markings around the eyes.
The smallest bear is the sun bear. It grows to be 4 to 5 feet long (1. 2 to 1. 5 m)
Sun bear cubs have no hair and cannot smell or hear when they are born. Their mother will often stand upright like a human and carry their cubs in their paws or mouth according to the San diego Zoo.
Newborn sun bears are even smaller and can weigh 7 to 12 ounces (198 to 340 g). The taxonomy of bears according to the Integrated Taxonomic Information system is:
The IUCN lists sun bears and sloth bears as vulnerable due to habitat loss. e
#Forest Loss and Climate: Empowering Communities Can Help (Op-Ed) Andrew Steer is the president and CEO of the World Resources Institute a global research organization that works in more than 50 countries.
Every minute of every day the planet loses an area of forest the size of 50 soccer fields.
The impact of effective forest rights in some cases can be seen from space. Satellite images of the Brazilian Amazon clearly show the difference between communities with rights to forests and those without.
Vitamin c also helps keep skin looking beautiful by helping fight against skin damage caused by the sun and pollution.
#Fall Colors Spotted from Space (Photos) Pictures from space show that fall is in full swing in parts of North america.
NASA's Terra satellite went leaf peeping last week from its perch about 438 miles (705 kilometers) above the planet.
Fall Foliage Seen from Space As the Earth Observatory notes the brown and orange hues are currently most prominent in Michigan's Upper Peninsula northern Wisconsin upstate New york New hampshire Vermont Maine and southern
Skin and hair Vitamin a can help protect against sun damage and vitamins C and E are well-known beauty supplements.#
which we hope will lay the foundation needed for them to become caretakers of our planet later in life#said executive producer Marisa Wolsky.
Kids and Science Good for More than Just a Grade According to the narrative Plum is a video game designer on the desolate Planet Blorb.
So Plum commandeers a space ship and flies to Earth where she meets and befriends Clem Oliver Gabi Brad and Cooper.
Over time Plum and her friends experience many mesmerizing and insightful discoveries about the planet.
and sun. Since its debut last April the website has garnered more than 8 million page views via 1. 5 million separate website visits.
until the same space is covered with many fewer, but much larger trees. For this reason, they only looked at plots where the forest was more than 200 years old parts of the forest spared from the axe
It's already the hottest place on the planet, and it's about to get hotter,
Nature Newsa team of researchers at the University of Bristol, UK, is suggesting that changing the crops farmers grow might help to cool the planet by reflecting more sunlight.
the albedo-the proportion of sunlight reflected back into space-of cropland would increase. Other things being equal,
On the basis of climate modelling they calculate that the planet would cool by a modest 0. 11 Â C. It's very small on the global average,
if true, the finding would require a major rethink of the planet's carbon budget. But the claim has proved controversial.
4. More water is lost also from the spaces between rubber trees, which grow farther apart than rainforest vegetation.
The satellite would have measured carbon dioxide concentrations in unprecedented detail, allowing scientists to track emission sources
There are some older instruments aboard satellites capable of measuring carbon dioxide, and Japan's Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite (GOSAT), launched in January this year,
will measure carbon dioxide as well as methane and water vapour. But when it comes to carbon dioxide none of these instruments have the precision that OCO was capable of providing.
Data from the satellite could have helped to improve reporting says Kevin Anderson, a researcher at the University of Manchester in the United kingdom. Ultimately,
satellites like OCO might smooth the passage of future climate agreements: The absence of reliable emissions data is a problem at every level,
We could probably do with having a fleet of 20 of these satellites, because the issue is so important,
AIRS, launched aboard the Aqua satellite in 2002. The European space agency (ESA) is mulling whether to proceed on a more advanced version of the OCO mission.
The proposed A-SCOPE (Advanced Space Carbon and Climate Observation of Planet Earth) would use a laser to actively probe the CO2 in the atmosphere.
Unlike OCO which was designed to use reflected sunlight, A-SCOPE would be able to perform measurements at night and in the presence of cloud cover.
the question moving forward will be how to validate observations from one satellite without the other.
Running the two satellites in parallel also might have produced insights into how both instruments work. We believe we can get the results,
while working on a next-generation satellite for launch in subsequent years. The question facing NASA is
Within a week of losing the satellite, NASA, which spent US$278 million and seven years developing OCO, put together a committee of two dozen climate scientists to weigh up various options.
while working with existing greenhouse-gas monitoring satellites such as Europe's Envisat and Japan's Greenhouse gases Observing Satellite (GOSAT, also known as IBUKI).
In a recent competition to design atmospheric-science satellites the European space agency eliminated a laser-based carbon-dioxide-monitoring mission
That represents approximately half of the world's non-satellite effort to monitor carbon dioxide. Tans was on the OCO science team,
but says he has worried long that excitement about satellites which are, after all, NASA's stock in trade leads politicians
A more even split in spending between ground and space would allow him to boost his network of sensors by an order of magnitude
but says there are things only a satellite can do, especially considering the importance of enforcing international climate treaties.
Fires hot enough to kill trees are bright enough to be seen from space at night.
Nature Newsthe water plumes erupting from the south pole of Saturn's moon Enceladus could be caused by a liquid ocean lurking many kilometres underground rather than by geysers erupting from a salty ocean just beneath the moon
because liquid water elsewhere in our solar system is the most promising place to look for signs of life.
or molecular sodium both in the plumes and in one of Saturn's rings thought to be fed by these plumes, the E ring.
He and his colleagues used cosmic-dust data from the Cassini spacecraft currently flying around Saturn to study grains in the E ring.
These grains travel out into space in the plumes along with salt-poor ice grains that are formed like snowflakes from pure water vapour.
That ocean should not have survived over the length of the Solar system, he says. Schneider says that
and overlaid radar and spectral data from US and Japanese satellites. They then extrapolated to build a biomass map of the Amazon basin circa 2000;
The arbiter will be a satellite, marking the first time that scientists have used space-based observations to fashion contracts at the level of individual farmers.
Unlike standard crop insurance, which requires on-the-ground audits, any payments will be distributed automatically according to a set formula,
it had failed to put its observation satellite into its intended orbit. A second rocket launch from South korean territory is planned for spring 2010.
) Environment Mercury contamination: A quarter of fish sampled from 291 streams across the United states between 1998 and 2005 contained levels of mercury higher than those deemed safe for human consumption,
which can be measured by remote-sensing methods such as satellites, degradation is evaluated through on-the-ground studies that assess what types of tree species are growing
to land registry programmes and a proposal from Brazil's National Institute for Space Research for a new satellite to monitor deforestation.
With global temperatures rising as a result of climate change, the emission of methane which traps about 25 times more of the Sun's heat than carbon dioxide will play a greater part in the global carbon budget than it does now
Nature Newsmysteriously, Earth has much less carbon in its rocks than would be expected from the amounts of carbon available in the planet-forming regions of our Galaxy.
Planets form from the disks of gas and dust that coalesce around stars. The gas and dust in these disks make up the interstellar medium that forms the space between stars in galaxies,
with the dust containing carbon-rich and silicate-rich grains. But despite the green, carbon-rich surface of our planet
Earth's mantle is remarkably poor in carbon compared with the amount in the interstellar medium.
Meteorites, thought to be the building blocks of our planet, also have missing carbon, whereas comets,
which are formed farther away from the Sun, do not. Conversely, silicon seems to make it from the interstellar medium, from
which planets form, into the bulk material of the planet. Astronomers have struggled to fully account for the carbon shortfall in Earth's mantle and in meteorites.
Now Ted Bergin at the University of Michigan, Ann arbor, has come up with a model that could explain what happened to the carbon.
He presented his ideas at the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry congress in Glasgow
UK, last week. Previous theories to explain why all the interstellar-medium carbon didn't make it into the material that formed Earth include the evaporation of primordial carbon-rich grains from the disk.
But for this model to work, temperatures would have to have been at least 1, 000 kelvin,
and at Earth's distance from the Sun, those temperatures are reached not. Bergin, together with Jeong-Eun Lee of Sejong University in South korea,
and their colleagues, modelled the chemical processes that could have been occurring in the disk, to see how hot the oxygen there might have been,
and where in the disk reactions might have been taking place. Bergin says that the surface of the disk would have been hot,
Because of this reaction, the middle part of the disk, where planets are formed, would become depleted in carbon.
which explains why planets such as Mars don't seem to have the carbon deficit. Mike Jura at the University of California, Los angeles, says that the model is very plausible.
one would expect to see lots of extra carbon in the gassy part of the disk from which planets are formed.
Mars delay: The launch of Russia's Phobos-Grunt mission to study Mars and collect soil samples from one of its moons has been postponed to 2011, together with China's first Mars probe,
the orbiter Yinghuo-1. Both crafts were supposed to take off in October this year, carried on a Russian rocket,
but Russian space agency Roscosmos said last week that Phobos testing couldn't be completed in time to meet this year's launch window.
Nature Newspolicy Events Funding Research Business The week ahead Number crunch News maker Policy Spaceflight review:
The US panel charged with reviewing NASA's human spaceflight programme issued its final report last week,
such as bypassing human exploration of the Moon and scrapping the Ares -I rocket in favour of commercial space flights, had already been aired in public meetings (see Nature 460,791;
2009). ) European research reform: The European commission has agreed that a top scientist should lead the administrative and managerial activities of the European Research Council (ERC), in place of the commission's current appointee, economist Andreu Mas-Colell.
Mercury deadline: The US Environmental protection agency (EPA) has agreed to set new rules governing emissions of mercury and other toxic chemicals from power plants by November 2011,
and Ocean Salinity satellite. go. nature. com/shq161 2 â oe6 November Nairobi, Kenya, hosts the Multilateral Initiative on Malaria's fifth Pan-African Malaria Conference. www. mimalaria. org/pamc 2 â oe6 November The United nations Framework
The week ahead 9 october NASA's Lunar crater Remote Observation and Sensing Satellite will crash into a crater near the Moon's south pole,
and detecting ice. http://lcross. arc. nasa. gov 15-16 october'The ambitions of Europe in space'European policy-makers,
and industrial representatives converge on Brussels to discuss the region's space programme. www. spaceconference. eu 15-25 october Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical physics (see Nature 461,
A NASA probe sent crashing into the Cabeus crater near the Moon's north pole on 9 october ploughed up a plume containing water, hydrocarbons and, unexpectedly, mercury,
and so contain a record of the Solar system's chemistry and evolution because material that falls in freezes, becoming trapped.
The water vapour and hydrocarbons detected by the Lunar crater Observation and Sensing Satellite could have reached the Moon through impacts with comets rich in organic compounds.
See go. nature. com/odk7he for more. Carbon cutters: Brazil has pledged to reduce its projected carbon dioxide emissions in 2020 by 36-39%below business-as usual levels, increasing pressure on other countries less than a month before the United nations climate summit in Copenhagen.
and lay future plans for studying the methane detected on Mars, at a workshop at the European space agency's centre for Earth observation in Frascati, Italy. www. congrex. nl/09c26 21 NOVEMBER Part of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act takes effect in the United states. The act,
says Carlos Nobre, a climate scientist at Brazil's National Institute for Space Research in S £o Josã dos Campos.
Our planet does not take into account where the emissions are coming from. The government is also rethinking its position on the role of forest carbon in a future climate treaty.
Satellites smash debris threatens Hubble An active communications satellite owned by Iridium Satellite of Bethesda, Maryland, slammed into a defunct Russian military communications satellite 800 kilometres above Siberia on 10 february 2009.
The collision sent hundreds of pieces of debris flying at high speed across low-Earth orbit, threatening other satellites and increasing the risk to a NASA shuttle mission to fix the Hubble Space Telescope
(see'Kaputnik chaos could kill Hubble'and'Collision debris increases risk to Earth-observing satellites'.
and other satellites have yet to be influenced by the shrapnel from the collision. But the debris has had a big impact here On earth, according to Brian Weeden, an orbital debris specialist at the Secure World Foundation, in Superior, Colorado,
which promotes cooperation in space. Before the collision the US Air force was tracking just a handful of vital American satellites.
Now, they are pretty much screening all active satellites for collisions, Weeden says. But there's still much to be done before Earth's orbit can be declared safe
Weeden says. In the near term, the Pentagon must warn private companies and other nations about possible collisions.
To that end, NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency hosted a conference this month to look at strategies for removing debris. The solutions floated include space tugs and Earth-based lasers.
dashing the hopes of scientists who wanted to use the satellite to measure sources and sinks of atmospheric carbon dioxide (see'Climate researchers in a spin after satellite loss').
and demands for the agency to launch other Earth-monitoring satellites continue undiminished. Fall out from funding crisis What has become of two scientists struggling to keep their labs alive in tight funding times,
or reflectiveness so absorbs more of the Sun's energy and contributes to warming at the surface.
Satellites beam in biomass estimates: Nature Newswhatever agreement emerges from the climate meeting in Copenhagen,
the first satellite-based estimates of the biomass contained in the world's tropical forests. Current biomass estimates for the tropics are gathered based on data by the Food and agriculture organization of the united nations (FAO),
harness data from multiple satellites as well as thousands of ground plots, and should help governments and other scientists to estimate how much carbon is locked within trees,
Like the Winrock study, it includes spectral data from NASA satellites as well as laser measurements of forest canopy height from an instrument on NASA's Ice, Cloud,
and land Elevation Satellite (ICESAT) that was designed to study polar ice caps. The two teams have yet to compare results.
Satellites can reliably track deforestation and increasingly, small-scale logging. In Copenhagen, Greg Asner of the Carnegie Institution of Science in Stanford, California,
Events Space tourism's new era: Enthusiastic space tourists got their first public viewing of the commercial passenger vehicle Spaceshiptwo (pictured,
centre: mounted under its carrier aeroplane Whiteknighttwo) on 7 december at Mojave Air and Space Port, California.
The rocket ship, developed by aviation designer Burt Rutan and bankrolled by British billionaire Richard Branson,
will carry passengers to the edge of outer space for US$200, 000 a ticket. Virgin Galactic,
They are unlikely to get space-borne until 2011 at least even if all flight testing goes smoothly.
Nature Newsstrike one planet from the list of 400-odd found around stars in other solar systems:
a proposed planet near a star some 6 Â parsecs from Earth may not exist after all.
The finding is also a strike against a planet-seeking strategy called astrometry, which measures the side-to-side motion of a star on the sky to see
whether any unseen bodies might be orbiting it. Ground-based astrometry has been used for more than a century,
but none of the extrasolar planets it has detected has been verified in subsequent studies. In May, Steven Pravdo of the Jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, California,
six times more massive than Jupiter, orbiting VB10, a star about one-thirteenth the mass of the Sun, using a telescope at the Palomar Observatory in southern California (S. Â Pravdo and S. Â Shaklan Astrophys.
 J. 700,623-632; 2009). ) But now a group led by Jacob Bean at the Georg-August University in Gottingen,
The planet is not there, says Bean. Bean and his colleagues used a well-honed technique called radial velocity,
which has found most of the extrasolar planets detected so far. The method looks for shifts in the lines of a star's absorption spectrum to track its motion towards and away from Earth,
which would be caused by the influence of a planet. Radial-velocity measurements typically exploit the visible bands of the electromagnetic spectrum.
But VB10 is a very dim star and gives off most of its light as infrared radiation.
At the Very Large Telescope in Chile, Bean placed a gas cell filled with ammonia in the path of the starlight,
if the planet was there, says Bean, who has submitted the work to the Astrophysical Journal (J. Â L. Â Bean et al.
but there is hyperbole in their rejection of our candidate planet. Bean's paper, for instance, only rules out the presence of any planet that is at least three times more massive than Jupiter, says Pravdo,
adding that the work limits certain orbits for possible planets but not all planets. Unfortunately, astrometry is a very difficult business,
counters Bean, explaining that Earth's atmosphere can introduce distortions that affect the measurements. Astrometrists rely on watching a field of stars about the same distance away as the target star to calibrate their measurements
and that can be tricky, says Alessandro Sozzetti, an astrometry expert at the Turin Observatory in Italy.
Even if we think we have selected a good set of reference stars, he says, we may still be limited by atmospheric effects that cause an extra jitter in the motion of those stars.
Alan Boss, an exoplanet expert at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, agrees. He points to the well-known'detection'of 1963,
when Dutch astronomer Piet van de Kamp used astrometry to claim that two planets were orbiting Barnard's Star a finding disproved a decade later.
The dispute over the VB10 planet says Boss, is another example of how hard it is to detect extrasolar planets using astrometry from the ground.
Astronomers expect astrometry to work much better above the distorting effects of the atmosphere. Two space missions in the works the European space agency's GAIA, due to launch in 2012,
and NASA's Space Interferometry Mission, the launch date for which is yet to be set will use the technique to search for planets as small as Earth around Sun-like stars,
says Sozzetti. More significantly, astrometry can yield the mass of a planet, whereas radial velocity only puts a lower limit on it.
Bean admits that astronomers might one day find a planet around VB10 if they scrutinize the star long and hard enough The main lesson from VB10,
says Boss, is that a lot of high-quality data are needed to be sure that an exoplanet is present.
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