In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

That's it, after some time in the dark, ESA declares end of mission for Envisat.

From the ESA: "Just weeks after celebrating its tenth year in orbit, communication with the Envisat satellite was suddenly lost on 8 April. Following rigorous attempts to re-establish contact and the investigation of failure scenarios, the end of the mission is being declared. A team of engineers has spent the last month attempting to regain control of Envisat, investigating possible reasons for the problem. Despite continuous commands sent from a widespread network of ground stations, there has been no reaction yet from the satellite."

Want to know more about all sensors that were onboard Envisat? Here's the wikipedia article.

That's the name of the Slashdot story, U.S. In Danger of Losing Earth-Observing Satellite Capability.

Their summary: "As reported in Wired, a recent National Research Council report indicates a growing concern for NASA, the NOAA, and USGS. While there are currently 22 Earth-observing satellites in orbit, this number is expected to drop to as low as six by the year 2020. The U.S. relies on this network of satellites for weather forecasting, climate change data, and important geologic and oceanographic information. As with most things space and NASA these days, the root cause is funding cuts. The program to maintain this network was funded at $2 billion as recently as 2002, but has since been scaled back to a current funding level of $1.3 billion, with only two replacement satellites having definite launch dates."

AGSE 2012 - Applied Geoinformatics for Society and Environment
5th International Conference and Summer School

Conference Theme: "Geoinformation - Catalyst for planning, development and good governance "

Location: Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Johor Bahru, Malaysia

Date: July 16 - 20, 2012

Conference Website: http://applied-geoinformatics.org

Email: agse@hft-stuttgart.de

Via this tweet, I learned about EOxServer, an open source server for Earth Observation data.

Here's how it is described: "EOxServer's mission: To provide an Open Source software framework to ease the online provision of big Earth Observation data archives via Open Standard services for efficient user exploitation.

• Open Source: MIT-style license
• software framework: Entirely based on Open Source (Python, MapServer, Django, GDAL, etc.)
• ease online provision: Admin GUI and command line data registration
• big Earth Observation data archives: Operators register existing raster data archives
• Open Standard services: Open in the sense of freely available; Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC); WMS, WCS, EO-WMS, EO-WCS
• efficient user exploitation: User defined sub-setting; view and download"

This project is funded in part by the European Space Agency (ESA).

Via the AGISRS mailing list I learned about today's announcement that Envisat is having problems and services are interrupted.

From the ESA announcement: " After 10 years of service, Envisat has stopped sending data to Earth. ESA’s mission control is working to re-establish contact with the satellite.
 
Although this landmark mission has been in orbit twice as long as it was designed for, ESA hopes to keep the satellite in service until the launch of the successor Sentinel missions."

Slashdot discusses a story named Remote-Controlled Planes Used For Wildlife Conservation. This of course has a relation with the recent story named Commercial Drones Taking To the Skies in the U.S.

Their summary: "Conservationists have converted a remote-controlled plane into a potent tool for conservation. The drone — an HK Bixler equipped with cameras, sensors and GPS — has been used to map deforestation, count orangutans and elephants, and get a bird's eye view of hard-to-access forest areas. During their 4 days of testing in Sumatra, the drone flew 30 missions without a single crash. A mission, which typically lasts about 25 minutes, can cover 50 hectares. The drone, full equipped, costs less than $2,000."

During the weekend, Slashdot discussed the stiry named Commercial Drones Taking To the Skies. And the reason why I'm sharing it is the inevitable impacts of ubiquitous commercial UAVs will have on remote sensing.

Their summary: "A new federal law, signed by the president on Tuesday, compels the Federal Aviation Administration to allow drones to be used for all sorts of commercial endeavors — from selling real estate and dusting crops, to monitoring oil spills and wildlife, even shooting Hollywood films. Local police and emergency services will also be freer to send up their own drones. But while businesses, and drone manufacturers especially, are celebrating the opening of the skies to these unmanned aerial vehicles, the law raises new worries about how much detail the drones will capture about lives down below — and what will be done with that information. Safety concerns like midair collisions and property damage on the ground are also an issue."

SS informed us that the USGS reported that the Landsat 5 mission is in jeopardy.

From the USGS: "The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has stopped acquiring images from the 27-year-old Landsat 5 Earth observation satellite due to a rapidly degrading electronic component. Landsat 5 was launched in 1984 and designed to last 3 years. The USGS assumed operation of Landsat 5 in 2001 and managed to bring the aging satellite back from the brink of total failure on several occasions following the malfunction of key subsystems. There is now an increasing likelihood that the Landsat 5 mission is nearing its end. [...] For several months, the Landsat flight operations team has been closely tracking the fluctuating performance of an amplifier essential for transmitting land-surface images from the Landsat 5 satellite to ground receiving stations in the U.S. and around the world.  Over the past 10 days, problems with the amplifier have led to drastically reduced image download capabilities, a sign of impending failure. [...] Landsat 8, currently called the Landsat Data Continuity Mission, is now scheduled to be launched in January 2013."

We obviously mentioned Landsat 5 often in the past, including in 2005, 2007 and 2009 when it suffered technical problems, but each time, was able to resume satellite imagery acquisition. This time, it's probable it's really the end of Landsat 5. Here's the Landsat 5 Wikipedia article.

Slashdot runs a discussion named Hackers Briefly Controlled US Government Satellites.

Their summary: "Two U.S. satellites have been tampered with by hackers — possibly Chinese ones — in 2007 and 2008, claims a soon-to-be released report by the the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. The two satellites, Landsat-7 and Terra AM-1, had been interfered with on four separate occasions, allowing the attackers to be in command of the satellites for two to over twelve minutes each time. Luckily, both of the satellites are used only for observing the Earth's climate and terrain, and the hackers never actually misused their control over them in any way."

Via AGISRS, I learned that last Friday was released Opticks 4.7.0, an open source remote sensing and imagery application that we mentioned a few times in the past. Opticks's IDL, Spectral and Python extensions were also updated.

Instead of the what's new, here's a reminder of what Opticks is according to their main page:

• Free and open source
• Supports the following file formats: NITF 2.0/2.1, GeoTIFF, ENVI, ASPAM/PAR, CGM, DTED, Generic RAW, ESRI Shapefile, HDF5, AVI, MPEG, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP
• Zoom, pan, rotate spatially large datasets
• Quickly layer GIS features, annotations, results, and other information over your data to provide context
• Many image display controls such as colormap, histogram, transparency, etc.
• Support for datasets larger than four gigabytes
• Analysts can quickly combine steps using graphical wizards
• Support for processing data in it's native interleave of BIP, BSQ or BIL
• Get extensions to drop in new capability.