3-Aug-2017: Joint Project between NASA and ISRO
ISRO and NASA are working towards realisation of NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission by 2021.
In NISAR mission, NASA is responsible for development of L-band SAR and ISRO is responsible for development of S-band SAR. The L & S band SAR will be integrated with ISRO’s spacecraft and launched on-board India’s GSLV. The total cost of the project includes ISRO’s work share cost of about Rs. 788.00 Cr and the cost of JPL’s work share of about USD 808 million. After the launch in 2021, the plan of action includes (i) calibration of instruments & validation of data products; (ii) development of science acquisition plan; (iii) development of data processing procedures & applications; and (iv) conduct of outreach activities in research institutes & academia.
NISAR employs a futuristic SweepSAR technique, which enables very wide swath of more than 200 km and very high resolution of the order of 5-10m. The L & S band microwave data obtained from this satellite will be useful for variety of application, which include estimating agricultural biomass over full duration of crop cycle; assessing soil moisture; monitoring of floods & oil slicks; coastal erosion, coastline changes; assessment of mangroves; surface deformation studies, ice sheet dynamics etc.
ISRO and NASA have a framework agreement for cooperation in the exploration and use of outer space for peaceful purposes signed in 2008. Under this framework agreement, ISRO and NASA have executed an implementing arrangement for cooperation in NISAR mission, which is valid until 2034 and provides scope for joint activities on science & applications of NISAR data after the launch.
2-Aug-2017: Israel launches first environmental research satellite Venus
Israel has launched its first environmental research satellite in a joint venture between the Israel Space Agency (ISA) and its French counterpart CNES.
The Venus satellite (Vegetation and Environment Monitoring New Micro-Satellite) is an earth-observation micro-satellite. The satellite’s goal is to obtain high-resolution photographs of specific sites to track environmental issues such as desertification, erosion, pollution, natural disasters, and other phenomena linked to climate change.
The high resolution — plants can be distinguished as little as five meters apart — makes possible “precision agriculture,” in which farmers would be able to accurately plan for water, fertilizer, and pesticide needs.
The technological mission of the satellite will test the operation of an innovative electric propulsion system based on the Israeli-designed Hall Effect Thrusters. A Hall-effect thruster (HET) is a relatively low power device used to propel a spacecraft after entering orbit or farther out into space.
The satellite will be able to take repeated photos of the same spot in the same light conditions (accounting for the position of the sun), allowing for more accurate tracking of changing environmental issues. This is called “heliosyncronis orbit” because it requires taking a photo of the same coordinates while the sun is in the same position. The satellite will circle the earth 29 times in each 48-hour period and will stay in commission for 4.5 years.
9-Jun-2017: The largest virtual Universe ever simulated
Researchers from the University of Zurich have simulated the formation of our entire Universe with a large supercomputer. A gigantic catalogue of about 25 billion virtual galaxies has been generated from 2 trillion digital particles. This catalogue is being used to calibrate the experiments on board the Euclid satellite, that will be launched in 2020 with the objective of investigating the nature of dark matter and dark energy.
Over a period of three years, a group of astrophysicists from the University of Zurich has developed and optimized a revolutionary code to describe with unprecedented accuracy the dynamics of dark matter and the formation of large-scale structures in the Universe. The code was executed on this world-leading machine for only 80 hours, and generated a virtual universe of two trillion (i.e., two thousand billion or 2 x 1012) macro-particles representing the dark matter fluid, from which a catalogue of 25 billion virtual galaxies was extracted.
Thanks to the high precision of their calculation, featuring a dark matter fluid evolving under its own gravity, the researchers have simulated the formation of small concentration of matter, called dark matter halos, in which we believe galaxies like the Milky Way form. The challenge of this simulation was to model galaxies as small as one tenth of the Milky Way, in a volume as large as our entire observable Universe. This was the requirement set by the European Euclid mission, whose main objective is to explore the dark side of the Universe.
Indeed, about 95 percent of the Universe is dark. The cosmos consists of 23 percent of dark matter and 72 percent of dark energy. The nature of dark energy remains one of the main unsolved puzzles in modern science. A puzzle that can be cracked only through indirect observation: When the Euclid satellite will capture the light of billions of galaxies in large areas of the sky, astronomers will measure very subtle distortions that arise from the deflection of light of these background galaxies by a foreground, invisible distribution of mass - dark matter. That is comparable to the distortion of light by a somewhat uneven glass pane.
This new virtual galaxy catalogue will help optimize the observational strategy of the Euclid experiment and minimize various sources of error, before the satellite embarks on its six-year data collecting mission in 2020. Euclid will perform a tomographic map of our Universe, tracing back in time more than 10-billion-year of evolution in the cosmos. From the Euclid data, researchers will obtain new information on the nature of this mysterious dark energy, but also hope to discover new physics beyond the standard model, such as a modified version of general relativity or a new type of particle.