Category Archives: Transhuman News

By Kelly Dickerson

An artist's conception of the 3D maps of forest architecture that data from GEDI could produce.(NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center)

A new laser instrument developed for the International Space Station is expected to generate incredible 3D maps of Earth's forests.

The instrument called Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) uses lidar, a special kind of laser technology, to create detailed 3D maps and measure the biomass of forests. NASA has already launched a satellite designed to measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but the new instrument, once launched, will allow scientists to estimate the total amount of carbon stored here on Earth inside trees.

"GEDI lidar will have a tremendous impact on our ability to monitor forest degradation, adding to the critical data needed to mitigate the effects of climate change," Patrick O'Shea, chief research officer at the University of Maryland, said in a statement.

Scientists already knew that trees absorb carbon. What scientists don't know is how much they store. This is a problem because scientists can't predict how much extra carbon would escape into the atmosphere if a forest was destroyed or if planting new trees would be enough to offset the emissions.

"One of the most poorly quantified components of the carbon cycle is the net balance between forest disturbance and regrowth," Ralph Dubayah, the GEDI principal investigator at the University of Maryland, said in the same statement.

GEDI's lidar instrument works by shooting streams of light particles at the Earth that then reflect back and are picked up by a detector. The time it takes the particles to reach Earth and bounce back is converted into a distance.

Every material that the light particles pass through on their journey leaves behind a "fingerprint" that the detector can read. That means that light particles that pass through leafy tree canopies will look different than the particles that pass through branches or trunks. The unique markers will allow scientists to construct detailed 3D maps of forest architecture.

The lidar pulses will measure the height of trees to about a 3-foot accuracy and allow scientists to estimate the total biomass in a forest and how much carbon it's storing.

Originally posted here:
Space lasers map forests

Astronaut Reid Wiseman is getting used to life back on Earth after recently returning from 166 days in orbit. In between space walks and research, Wiseman shared a remarkable view from the International Space Station. He picked up 330,000 followers on Twitter before landing in Kazakhstan last week.

"This was my first space flight, so I'd never looked down on the Earth from 260 miles up, and when you do that the first couple times, you're taken to a special place," Wiseman told "CBS This Morning" from the Johnson Space Center in Houston. "You're breathless, really, just looking out at the horizon is so beautiful."

It was that beauty that led him to begin his social media campaign.

"You have this extreme desire to share it," Wiseman said. "And I was lucky enough to have a conduit to share this journey with everyone, and it really caught fire and it was great. It was great for me, and I'm really happy it happened that way."

Among the scenes he captured were sunsets, typhoons and pyramids, but he shared his most memorable sight on nearly every platform, sending out multiple Vines, Instagram posts, and Tweets.

"Really I think the aurora and lightning storms, just watching how amazing that event is, just kind of flying through the swimming aurora," Wiseman said. "And we saw some really powerful aurora, much more than my fellow astronauts have been able to see, so we were just super lucky."

He said some of the most extraordinary things about being in space were watching changes on Earth from an entirely knew perspective.

"Doing all the science is amazing, and then any spare time you have, you get to go down to the greatest window humanity has ever known and look back at our planet," Wiseman said. "Just watching our planet over an entire six months, watching summer turn to winter, seeing the aurora thunderstorms, it's just, it's magnificent, it really is magnificent."

Even adjusting to life on the ISS was an experience for him.

"Being weightless, trying to learn, watching your body change while you're up there," he said.

The rest is here:
A window into space through NASA's online sensation

The orbital maneuvers of a mysterious object Russia launched earlier this year have raised concerns that the satellite may be a space weapon of some sort.

The speculation centers on "Object 2014-28E," which Russia lofted along with three military communications satellites in May. Russian officials did not declare the object as part of the launch, and it was originally thought to be space junk. But satellite trackers have watched it perform a number of interesting maneuvers over the past few weeks, theFinancial Times reportedMonday (Nov. 17).

Last weekend, for example, 2014-28E apparently met up with the remnants of a rocket stage that helped the object reach orbit. [The Most Destructive Space Weapons Concepts]

As a result, some space analysts wonder if Object 2014-28E could be part of ananti-satellite program perhaps a revived version of the Cold War-era "Istrebitel Sputnikov" ("satellite killer") project, which Russian officials have said was retired when the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s.

Military officials have long regarded the ability to destroy or disable another country's satellites as a key national-security capability. The Soviet Union is not the only nation known to have worked on developing such technology; China destroyed one of its own weather satellites in a 2007 test that spawned a huge cloud oforbital debris, and the United States blew up one of its own defunct spacecraft in 2008.

The concern about Object 2014-28E is legitimate, said Joan Johnson-Freese, a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. But she cautioned against jumping to conclusions, saying that Russia could have a number of purposes in mind for the technology that 2014-28E may be testing out.

"Anysatellitewith the capability to maneuver has the potential to be a weapon," Johnson-Freese told Space.com. "But does that mean necessarily that all maneuverable satellites are weapons? No."

The United States has also worked to develop maneuverable-satellite technology, she noted, citing the Air Force's Experimental Satellite System-11 (XSS-11) and NASA's DART (Demonstration for Autonomous Rendezvous Technology) spacecraft, both of which launched in 2005. Further, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) managed a mission calledOrbital Express, which launched in 2007 to test out satellite-servicing tech.

"When we did DART and XSS-11, other countries went into panic mode you know, 'The U.S. has space weapons,'" Johnson-Freese said. "The first thing we did was assuage those concerns and say, 'No, no. That's not what it is. It's just a maneuverable satellite.' But any time you have dual-use technology, there are going to be concerns."

And pretty much all space technology is dual-use, said Brian Weeden, a technical adviser with the Secure World Foundation (a nonprofit organization dedicated to space sustainability) and a former orbital analyst with the Air Force. For example, spacecraft capable of orbital rendezvous operations could help a nation inspect, service andrefuel its satellites, or deorbit defunct craft to help mitigate the growing space-junk problem.

More here:
Does Russia have an orbiting space weapon?