Decadal Plan For Space-Based Earth Observation Released
Reducing Climate Uncertainty, Improving Weather Forecasts, and Understanding Sea-Level Rise Are Among Top Science Priorities for Space-Based Earth Observation Over Next Decade, National Academy of Sciences
“NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the United States Geological Survey (USGS) should implement a coordinated approach for their space-based environmental observations to further advance Earth science and applications for the next decade, says a new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. This approach should be based on key scientific questions in areas such as reducing climate uncertainty, improving weather and air quality forecasts, predicting geological hazards, and understanding sea-level rise. The report also recommends building a robust, resilient, and balanced U.S. program of Earth observations from space that will enable the agencies to strategically advance the science and applications with constrained resources.”
Bridenstine On Earth Science: “We Need To Follow The Decadals”, earlier post
“Rep. Jim Bridenstine, R-Okla., President Donald Trump’s nominee for NASA administrator, spoke glowingly of the decadal survey process during his Nov. 1 confirmation, and he said “yes” when Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., asked if he would follow the recommendations. Bridenstine said the surveys lead policymakers to “make good decisions,” and he added: “We need to follow the decadals.”
Unfortunately to actually read the report would cost $104 in paperback. I don’t see any mention of the ISS but I hope it is considered as a platform to allow rapid progress in sensor technology, global coverage, and high rate data download.
The National Academies web page for the survey
https://www.nap.edu/catalog…
does have a link to download a free electronic version (PDF.) That seems to be a common compromise between a publisher who wants to make money (which the NAS is), and insistence on open access for things like this.
Scientists writing proposals to NASA are often expected to cite decadal surveys to show their proposal is relevant to the sort of thing NASA is supposed to fund. That more-or-less puts NASA in a position where they have to make these reports open access.
The National Academies of Science which owns NAP was created by an Act of Congress signed by President Lincoln as a Non-Profit and is required by law to provide scientific advice to the government for free. It’s an example of the flexibility Congress has in creating public-private entities to support national needs.
Thanks, upon reading it I find a handful of references to flying instruments on the ISS as development experiments but no consistent plan for utilizing the ISS toits full potential as a platform for Earth observation.
It’s a welcome conclusion to designate a flagship imaging spectrometer for Earth. At the Moon, Mars, Mercury and elsewhere such instruments have made the cover of Science.
I’m not entirely sure what you mean by that. Imaging spectrometers are quite common on Earth orbiting spacecraft. I’m more used to them for IR surface mapping (things like resource utilization) than atmospheric science. In contrast, planetary missions tend to be very highly constrained by data rates. As a example, one instrument on GOES-R (now GOES-1) the Geostationary Lightning Mapper, sends does 500 frames per second of 1300×1300 pixel images, for a downlink rate of 7.7 Mbits/s. In contrast, the Cassini mission maxed out at about 150 kbps while at Saturn and wasn’t downlinking most of the time. Personally, and in a different field, I’d really love to have the sorts of data rates available to terrestrial, magnetospheric missions. They typically consider the highest time resolution similar planetary instruments manage to be orders of magnitude slower than what they are used to.
What I mean is what I said. I’ve been doing this work for 30 years almost exclusively with airborne sensors. I was on the Hyperion/EO1 Team. None of the unclass sensors flown to look at Earth have been top-shelf imaging spectrometers like the new Decadal now designates. If I remember correctly Hyperion was f11 and built of spare parts from Lewis, which never recorded data. Earth is due.
Ok. Hyperion/EO1 gives me a better idea of the sort of instruments you mean. From the USGS web page that was 30-m resolution data cubes at 220 wavelengths between 0.4 and 2.5 microns. That would be a really nice data set, especially if you could get global coverage repeated every few months. I’m not questioning the value of that, or that it’s something worth doing.
What I didn’t understand was your implication we’ve flown similar instruments to other planets. The Mars infrared instruments I’m familiar with are multispectral, not hyperspectral (i.e. imaging in a dozen or so wavelength bands rather than hundreds.)
For outer planets, Cassini/VIMS instrument comes closest to hyperspectral imaging, with 352 wavelengths between 0.3 and 5.1 microns. But the resolution is nowhere near 30 meters, and the IR side of the instrument actually measures one pixel at a time and has to scan to build up an image. Nor did VIMS get global coverage (unless you count very low resolution) of any body in the Saturn system. Well, I should qualify that; Saturn itself is big, so if you define resolution in degrees rather than kilometers, I guess VIMS got good-resolution, global coverage of Saturn. UV instruments tends to be better in terms of spectral resolution but not spatial coverage or resolution.
The analogy is not quite complete, but a committee that sets it’s loyalties to a mission, or industry, or that just leans toward the science, even with the problem of incentives and such that may fail, may have more advantages than not. See>
https://www.washingtonpost….