There have always been those who question the need for space programs and space policy, arguing that the money "would be better spent down here on earth." Let's start with the obvious rejoinder: down here IS where the money is spent. There are no shopping malls in space - at least not yet.
It's more to the point to debate where the biggest bang for the buck is waiting; the benefits are becoming greater all the time, even if not fully appreciated by most people. We could be doing a lot more, but we're already getting quite a lot for our money. Follow me past the Orange Omnilepticon for news on how space-based programs are giving us information we can not get any other way, and a spectacular sampling of the incredible beauty of the Earth as seen from above.
Let's start with California. The "Space Patrol" is putting an expanding fleet of "eyes" on the planet. The BBC science correspondent Jonathan Amos reports that Europe's Sentinel-1a satellite is providing remarkable new data on how the Napa Valley is settling after a big earthquake in August.
Sentinel-1a was launched earlier this year to acquire frequent and systematic radar data on the world's major tectonic hotspots.
As a consequence, researchers have been getting a snapshot of Napa every time the satellite goes overhead, every 12 days.
"What's absolutely stunning is that we see the fault continuing to slowly creep at the surface - by up to 10 cm over a couple of months," explained Prof Tim Wright from the UK's Nerc Centre for the Observation and Modelling of Earthquakes, Volcanoes and Tectonics (COMET).
It would be possible to get this kind of information on the ground (and it often is, to cross-check satellite data), but it would be a far more intensive/expensive process to match what the satellite can do with its dedicated sensors.
"With Sentinel, we are now in a new era for InSAR,"[Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry] said Prof Wright, who is based at Leeds University in the UK.
"Whereas in the past we've been able to do a few detailed studies in a few places, now we can look at all the major faults on the entire planet in this way.
"We can now look at every earthquake and try to pick out processes we've never had the chance to see before."
And the same will be true for volcanoes, landslides, and subsidence - basically, any phenomenon that involves deformation of the Earth's surface.
What is more, this capacity will be boosted in 2016 when the EU launches a sister spacecraft to Sentinel-1a.
Then, the repeat time to view the same location will be cut to just six days, meaning scientists can undertake even more rapid analyses of events.
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Judging how California is doing in terms of drought is also getting help from space. Again from Jonathan Amos at the BBC,
Scientists have assessed the scale of the epic California drought and say it will require more than 40 cubic km of water to return the US state to normal. The figure was worked out by weighing the land from space.
The American West Coast has been hit by big storms in recent days, but this rainfall is only expected to make a small dent in California's problems.
Researchers described their research at the American Geophysical Union's Fall Meeting in San Francisco.
The US space agency (Nasa) used its Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace) satellites in orbit to help make the calculations. These spacecraft measure the very subtle variations in Earth's gravity as they fly around the globe.
This shifting tug results from changes in mass, and this is influenced by the rise and fall in the volume of water held in the land.
Quite simply, there's no easy way to get this kind of information by other means. The gravity measurements the GRACE satellites do can quantify how much water remains in the ground. What they lack in fine detail,
they make up for in broad coverage.
Grace data indicates total water storage in these basins - that is all snow, surface water, soil moisture and ground water combined - has plummeted by roughly 15 cubic km a year.
This number is not far short of all the water that runs through the great Colorado River (nearly 20 cubic km), which is one of the primary sources for import into the state.
Jay Famiglietti from Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California said: "We've shown that it's now possible to explicitly quantify previously elusive drought indictors like the beginning of the drought or the end of the drought, and importantly the severity of the drought in any point in time.
"That is, we can now begin to answer the question: how much water will it take to end the drought?
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The value of this kind of information for making decisions is incalculable - good decisions require good information. Space-based systems allow us to "see" what's happening in near real-time with a scope we've never had before. Those capabilities are allowing us to see what's happening to the planet.
Kenneth Chang's report in the NY Times on snow and ice in the arctic is based in large part on what satellites have been showing us. Quite simply, without "eyes in space" looking down, we'd still be guessing at what's really happening out there and we'd have a limited view to work from which might lead to missing subtle effects.
The extent of Arctic sea ice, which retreats in summer, did not hit a record low in 2014. But it was the sixth lowest since satellite measurements began in 1979, and the scientists noted that the eight smallest extents have occurred in the last eight years.
“We can’t expect records every year,” Martin Jeffries of the Office of Naval Research, who edited this year’s report, said at a news conference here at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union. “It need not be spectacular for the Arctic to continue to be changing.”
There are already indications that a new platform, OCO-2 (Orbiting Carbon Observatory) is going to give us critical new information on global carbon movements.
Again from Jonathan Amos:
The new maps contain only a few weeks of data in October and November, but demonstrate the promise of the mission.
Clearly evident within the charts is the banding effect that describes how emitted gases are mixed by winds along latitudes rather than across them.
Also apparent are the higher concentrations over South America and southern Africa. These are likely the result of biomass burning in these regions.
It is possible to see spikes, too, on the eastern seaboard of the US and over China. These probably include the additional emissions of CO2 that come from industrialisation.
"We're very early into the mission and collecting data, yet as we show, we can take five weeks of that information and give you a quick picture of global carbon dioxide," said deputy project scientist Annmarie Eldering.
"It really suggests to us that OCO-2 will be very useful for finding out about where carbon dioxide is coming from and being taken back up around the globe," she told BBC News.
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If we are going to keep from using up this planet and turning it into an orbiting trash heap, we need all the information we can get - and we need to keep thinking about the bigger picture to keep it in perspective.
There is one thing those orbiting instruments can't measure for us though - how beautiful our world is when seen by human eyes from above. American Don Pettit is a chemical engineer and NASA astronaut who has spent an amazing amount of time in space, looking back at earth among his other tasks. A BBC Earth story looks at Pettit and other NASA photographers whose work is the subject of a short film. Enjoy!
http://youtu.be/...