NASA Earth Observatory

The areas in red show where understory fires occurred in the Amazon rainforest from 1999 to 2010.

Small fires in the Amazon rain forest are having a huge impact.

A new satellite imaging technique has allowed scientists to see Amazonian fires burning beneath the jungle canopy, called "understory fires," which were previously difficult to detect. These fires destroy several times more forest than is taken out by deforestation each year, according to a new study, published recently in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

Unlike fires in the Amazon's grassy areas, which can spread rapidly and are known to have towering flames, understory fires burn nearly undetected. But between 1999 and 2010, these forest fires burned more than 33,000 square miles (85,500 square kilometers), an area larger than the state of South Carolina, according to a NASA release.

"Amazon forests are quite vulnerable to fire, given the frequency of ignitions for deforestation and land management at the forest frontier, but we've never known the regional extent or frequency of these understory fires," Doug Morton, a researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and the study's lead author, said in NASA's statement.

Signs of damage appear in the year after the fires occur, and then gradually disappear as the rain forest recovers, the NASA statement said. Scientists are using an instrument on the Terra satellite to detect these signs of damage, which include slight alterations in the amount and condition of foliage present.

These fires kill between 10 and 50 percent of the trees in the areas they burn and are likely an important source of carbon emissions that hasn’t been adequately accounted for in climate models, according to NASA.

The fires only happen when climatic conditions are right — for example, during times of low humidity, according to the statement. The fires usually occur near inhabited areas, however, and are likely ignited by cigarettes, campfires and other human sources, NASA said.

Email Douglas Main or follow him on Twitter or Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebookor Google+. Article originally on LiveScience.com.

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Swiss Space Systems

The Switzerland-based Swiss Space Systems announced plans to launch a privately built SOAR unmanned space plane from an Airbus A300 jetliner by 2017 for small satellite launches.

By Rob Coppinger
Space.com

LONDON — A Swiss company has unveiled an ambitious plan to build a robotic rocket plane by 2017 in order launch satellites into orbit.

The company Swiss Space Systems (S3) plans to loft the unmanned suborbital shuttle from the back of an Airbus A300 jetliner to serve as a commercial satellite launch platform. The Payerne, Switzerland-based firm unveiled the satellite launch concept on March 13 and is expected to reveal the supplier of its shuttle rocket engine in April.

"S3 aims to develop, build, certify and operate suborbital space shuttles dedicated to launching small satellites, enabling space access to be made more democratic thanks to an original system with launching costs up to four times less than at present," the company announced in a statement. "The first test launches will be carried out by the end of 2017."

S3 officials said they plan to build a mock-up of the unmanned mini-shuttle by 2014, then open the a commercial spaceport in Payerne in 2015. The first flightworthy spacecraft prototype is slated to be built by in 2016, with the initial test flights following a year later. If all goes well, commercial satellite launches would begin in 2018. [Photos: Swiss Robotic Mini-Shuttle Concept Unveiled]

The unmanned satellite launches may be just the beginning, S3 officials said.

"Our first priority is the launch of small satellites until 2018," Gregoire Loretan, S3's head of communications, told Space.com in an email. "And the goal for S3 is to establish certification process and standards to help the development of manned flight afterwards."

Swiss Space Systems

This artist's illustration shows the Swiss Space Systems unmanned SOAR space plane gliding back to its spaceport after launching a small satellite.

A new rocket plane rises
According to S3's flight plan, the company plans to launch its robot rocket plane from an altitude of about 33,000 feet (10,000 meters). After separating from the carrier plane, the rocket plane will fire a liquid oxygen and kerosene rocket engine to reach an altitude of nearly 50 miles (80 kilometers).

S3 officials have dubbed the vehicle a space plane, though technically the rocket-powered craft will not fly high enough to cross the recognized the boundary of space, about 62 miles (100 km). But the 50-mile target altitude is high enough to launch a satellite into orbit. [Space Plane Evolution Explained (Infographic)]

At that height, the robotic shuttle will open its cargo bay doors to deploy a satellite equipped with its own rocket engine, a third stage, to launch the 550-pound (250 kilograms) satellite into an orbit about 434 miles (700 km) above Earth. The mini-shuttle should then glide back to Earth and land at its home spaceport.

The total development cost for the launch system is estimated to be about 200 million Swiss Francs, or $211 million. Another 50 million Francs ($53 million) will pay for a Swiss spaceport, S3 officials said.

"The overall budget is 250 millions (Swiss Francs), this includes one spaceport. A large part of this budget is already covered by private investors and our partners," Loretan said.

Swiss Space Systems

An illustration of the Swiss Space Systems unmanned space plane SOAR space plane's upper stage rocket engine for launching small satellites into orbit.

The S3 rocket plane will be able to launch small satellites, as well as tiny cubesats, he added. Loretan also states that the shuttle’s satellite dispenser is "adaptative," meaning S3 can mix the types of spacecrafts the vehicle will launch during a mission.

S3 already has four launch agreements with one of its partner organizations, Belgium's Von Karman Institute, a fluid dynamics research center. The cost per launch is predicted to be $10.5 million.

Loretan added that details of the satellite release procedure are still being developed.  

"We are discussing with a robotic company for the opening of the payload bay and the satellite release mechanism. At the moment, the solution is not defined," he said.

Partners building on experience
S3 has teamed up with several industry partners for the suborbital rocket plane project. They include the Belgian aerospace engineering company Sonaca; the UK engineering firm Meggit; the Belgian technology firm Space Application Systems (SAS);  Spain's Deimos Space aerospace company; French aerospace specialist Dassault Aviation; and Belgium’s Von Karman Institute.

"These partners, technical advisers and sponsors all contribute to our project, with technical support, material support, financial support, human resources and the heritage of already developed and certified technologies," Loretan said.

The Swiss watch manufacturer Breitlingis S3's main sponsor and has a historical association with spaceflight. A Breitling watch was worn in space by NASA Mercury 7 astronaut Scott Carpenter during his 1962 Aurora 7 orbital flight.

For the mini-shuttle, Deimos is working on guidance, navigation and control and mission analysis; Sonaca, the vehicle’s structures; Meggitt is providing the sensors; SAS, the software; and Dassault Aviation, the aviation systems.

Dassault officials said  "the S3 project is directly derived" from its hypersonic reusable aircraft project VEHRA, which was designed to launch small satellites of up to 300kg into low-Earth orbit.

Video animations of a VEHRA space plane being launched by an Airbus airlinerhave been available online since at least 2007. In those simulations, the VEHRA craft are seen using a robotic arm to deploy payloads.

"We have been collaborating with Dassault since 2005," Loretan said. "S3 launching system concept is based on VEHRA's concept, but the shape, structure, propulsion engine, systems architecture , third stage development, mechanization and robotics, software and systems are all different."

Certification and landing site hurdles
While Switzerland is not a member of the European Union, the country is a member state of the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), the EU's version of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.

"We want to certify our launching systems, and we are already working in collaboration with the EASA rule makers for these new rules (we already took part to several workshops and meetings in Brussel)," Loretan explained. "This is a priority for our company to invest in the development of these rules."

Compared to the United States, continental Europe is a densely populated area. While the A300 could launch the S3 mini-shuttle from a site over the Atlantic Ocean or other unpopulated region, the rocket plane's glide range is much shorter than that of its carrier aircraft, so returning to continental Europe after a satellite launch may not be possible.

To solve that problem, S3 officials have reached out to the government of Morocco and Spaceport Malaysia as partners. The Swiss company is working with them to have safe launch areas.

"Morocco wants to build a spaceport in their country, and this is definitely an interesting location to have our first flights," Loretan said. "We will sign a (memorandum of understanding) with this country as we already did with Malaysia, with the same scope of collaboration. We want to operate (in Malaysia) by 2018, but we could also make flight tests over there earlier."

But before any S3 launches liftoff from Morocco or Malaysia, S3 will develop its $53 million spaceport at Payerne airport. S3 and its 25 employees are located in Payerne city, which is in a western area of Switzerland, about 30 miles east of France.

"We are already discussing this (spaceport) project with local and federal authorities, and we plan to pursue these discussions in the next couple of months," Loretan said.

Because of its large local populace, flights from Payerne would only be during civilian air traffic hours. Typically in Europe that is between 6 a.m. and midnight, Loretan added.

Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

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India Space Research Organization

An India Space Research Organization PSLV rocket (Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle) launches seven satellites from the Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota, India, on Monday.

By Miriam Kramer
Space.com

A rocket carrying seven new satellites, including the first spacecraft designed to hunt huge asteroids and two of the world's smallest space telescopes, launched into space Monday from an Indian spaceport.

The Indian Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle blasted off at 7:31 a.m. EST from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, India, on a mission to deliver its multinational payloads into Earth orbit.

Monday's rocket flight primarily aimed to launch the new ocean-monitoring SARAL satellite into orbit for the Indian Space Research Organization and French Space Agency. The satellite is the first in a series of satellites created by ISRO to image the Earth, conduct space science, and carry out oceanic and atmospheric studies, ISRO officials said.

Several other payloads rode piggyback on the PSLV rocket, including the $25 million Near-Earth Object Surveillance Satellite (NEOSSat), a small spacecraft designed to seek out large asteroids in orbits that may stray near the Earth.

The suitcase-size satellite cannot track small space rocks like asteroid 2012 DA14, the  130-foot (40 meters) object that buzzed the Earth on Feb. 15, but scientists working with NEOSSat will use it to search for a specific types of asteroids that are at least 31 million miles (50 million kilometers) from Earth, mission scientist said. [See how NEOSSat tracks asteroids (Video)]

Canadian Space Agency

An artist's illustration of the NEOSSat asteroid-hunting satellite in Earth orbit. The Canadian Space Agency mission will search for large asteroids near Earth and track space debris.

"NEOSSat will probably reduce the impact hazard from unknown large NEO’s (near-Earth objects) by a few percent over its lifetime, but is not designed to discover small asteroids near the Earth that may be on collision courses," NEOSSat co-principal investigator Alan Hildebrand of the University of Calgary wrote in a statement.

Two smaller nanosatellites developed in Canada also hitched a ride into orbit alongside SARAL and NEOSSat in what their builders have billed as the world's smallest space telescope mission. The twin satellites make up the BRIght Target Explorer (BRITE) mission, which includes two tiny cubes, each just 8 inches (20 centimeters) across and weighing less than 15.5 pounds (7 kilograms). The satellites are expected to study the brightest stars in the night sky by measuring how their brightness changes over time.

The compact satellites were designed at the Space Flight Laboratory at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies. One of the satellites was built at the laboratory and the other was assembled by a partner team in Austria, university officials said.

University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies

Cordell Grant puts the finishing touches on the first BRITE satellite at UTIAS-SFL. The tiny nanosatellite, designed to study the brightest stars in the night sky, was one of seven spacecraft launched by
India on Monday.

"As their name suggests, the BRITE satellites will focus on the brightest stars in the sky, including those that make up prominent constellations like Orion the Hunter," university officials explained in a statement. "These stars are the same ones visible to the naked eye, even from city centers. Because very large telescopes mostly observe very faint objects, the brightest stars are also some of the most poorly studied stars."

The two BRITE nanosatellites are part of a planned constellation that is expected to eventually number six satellites in all once complete.

Another Canadian satellite was launched today as well. SAPPHIRE, Canada's first military satellite, is a small spacecraft designed to monitor space debris and satellites within an orbit 3,728 to 24,855 miles (6,000 to 40,000 kilometers) above Earth. The satellite is expected to augment the U.S. military's existing Space Surveillance System.

"It is with great pleasure that I announce that Canada’s Sapphire satellite has been successfully launched," Defense Minister Peter MacKay said in a statement. "Sapphire is a sound investment that will help safeguard billions of dollars of space assets, in fields such as telecommunications, weather, search and rescue, and global positioning systems."

The other satellites launched on India's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle Monday were a mixed bag of spacecraft and missions. They included:

AAUSAT3: A small science satellite developed in Denmark and built by students from Aalborg University.

STRaND-1: The first smartphone-powered satellite ever launched into space.  The Android phone that functions as the satellite's brain will run four apps that will take photos from the satellite, test the Earth's magnetic field, monitor the health of the satellite, and allow people around the world to upload videos that will play in space on the phone.

Monday's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle C20 mission is India's first rocket launch of 2013.

Follow Miriam Kramer on Twitter @mirikramer or Space.com @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook and Google+. 

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NASA

A NASA research plane flies over a tethered rheostat balloon in Huron, Calif., during a flight to help monitor air quality.

By Becky Oskin
LiveScience

Anyone who's ever driven down Interstate 5 in central California's Kern County knows about the smell. The one that penetrates cars despite closed vents and windows. Wafting from an adjacent cattle ranch, the largest on the West Coast, the well-known odor comes from the ammonia all those cows produce.

California's Central Valley, which spans I-5, regularly has some of the worst air pollution in the United States because of its unfortunate combination of geography and agriculture. It is ringed by mountains that trap bad air like water in a bathtub, and it is lined with fertile soils that produce much of the country's vegetables, fruits, nuts and meat, along with pollutants.

The region's unique pollution profile drew the attention of NASA scientists, who recently sent two research planes on swooping arcs from Bakersfield to Fresno on a mission to improve air-quality monitoring in the United States.

Tight lid traps pollution
The Central Valley bathtub has a shallow lid, the flights revealed, and this contributes to the region's poor air quality. "All of the pollution is confined to a very shallow boundary layer, about 1,500 feet (450 meters) and as shallow as 500 feet (150 m)," said Luke Ziemba, an atmospheric scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center. "We would spiral down into this muck and get very clean air above the boundary and very polluted air below."

Farm Sanctuary

A cattle ranch in California's Central Valley.

The region's shallow, thin boundary layer, the lowest layer of the atmosphere, confounds both satellites monitoring the pollutants and the atmospheric models that predict the occurrence of these pollutants, Ziemba said. "Models in the San Joaquin Valley get the composition wrong, and when satellites try to retrieve the properties of the aerosols, it can be difficult," he said.

Ammonia from dairy farms is part of the problem, Ziemba said. The ammonia creates chemical droplets called aerosols that accumulate in the valley's stagnant air. Aerosols and other tiny particles confuse satellites. From space, the instruments can't distinguish between pollution located high in the atmosphere and that found at the surface, where people live.

"Near-surface pollution is one of the most challenging problems for Earth observations from space," said Jim Crawford, the mission's principal investigator. "To look at ground level, you still have to look through the whole atmosphere."

Nor can satellites readily detect the difference between liquid and frozen droplets. "Basically, we have to make an educated guess as to the type of aerosol we're looking at," said David Starr, a NASA project scientist at Goddard Space Flight Center.

Better tracking
To better monitor aerosols and other pollutants, such as ozone and small particulates, NASA has launched a five-year, $30 million mission called DISCOVER-AQ, for Deriving Information on Surface conditions from Column and Vertically Resolved Observations Relevant to Air Quality. "The most tortured title in all of our Earth Ventures," said NASA program manager Hal Maring.

DISCOVER-AQ will use the airplane missions to help improve air-quality monitoring on the ground and from space, Crawford said. Researchers will use the information for a planned 2017 pollution-monitoring satellite, called TEMPO. The data will also give scientists the opportunity to compare the view of satellites from space with that from stations on the ground, as well as from aircraft. [Top 10 Craziest Environmental Ideas]

NASA

Two NASA planes tracked pollution in Callifornia's Central Valley in January and February.

"Even in urban areas, there's a fairly sparse (monitoring) network," Crawford said. "What's really happening there is a difficult question to answer. If you could learn to use satellites to diagnose what's happening, we could begin to broaden our understanding of what's driving air quality," he said.

The Central Valley is the second of four stops for the researchers. The first was Baltimore, in 2011, and the next two are Houston and Colorado.

Improving satellites
In the Central Valley, one plane, a P-3B, spiraled in the atmosphere below 15,000 feet (4,500 m), skimming as low as 100 feet (30 m) over local airports to capture pollution levels near the surface. Because the boundary layer was so low, the researchers also launched a tethered balloon to record surface pollutants.

At the same time, a B200 King Air plane flew as high as 26,000 feet (8,000 m). The plane's instruments looked down at the surface like a satellite, measuring particulates and gaseous air pollution along agricultural and traffic corridors.

The flight paths of the two planes passed over air-quality ground stations, as well as underneath a fleet of eight Earth-observing satellites, called the Afternoon Constellation or "A-train," that soar over California every afternoon within 15 minutes of each other. [Satellites Gallery: Science from Above]

"They come over at 1:30 p.m., which is the worst time of day as far as emissions are concerned. Emission are concentrated in the morning, but these satellites were not launched with air quality in mind," Crawford said. "That's what this observing strategy is looking forward to in the future. We hope these experiments make them better."

Reach Becky Oskin at boskin@techmedianetwork.com. Follow her on Twitter @beckyoskin.

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Courtesy of Mokko Studio

A visualization of Earth from space as seen in the new PBS documentary "Earth from Space" by NOVA.

By Miriam Kramer
LiveScience

A new documentary premiering Wednesday night on PBS promises to show the Earth as you've never seen it before ... from space.

Produced by NOVA, the documentary "Earth from Space" explores how satellites and spacecraft have revolutionized how scientists look at the world and its intricate systems.

Only by taking a satellite eye's view of the Earth can scientists studying the geology and climate of the planet gain a sense of just how interconnected the sea, land and air of the planet are, said Waleed Abdalati, the director of the Earth Science and Observation Center run through the University of Colorado at Boulder and a participant in the two-hour documentary.

"I think intuitively we know there are connections, but when you can actually trace dust storms off the Sahara to weather events in North America it changes things," Abdalati said.

Thanks to satellite data, climate models have been refined, Abdalati added. All 15 climate models in place before most of the Earth-observing satellites were launched have now been changed to reflect the new data gathered by the satellites. Scientists have taken that information to craft a more accurate picture of what future climates could look like. [See a Preview of NOVA's 'Earth from Space']

"The real power of satellite observations is that they represent objective truth," explains Piers Sellers, an ecologist and former astronaut, in the documentary. "They tell us about what the world actually is doing, not what we would like to be doing, not what we might fear it to be doing, but what it's actually doing. And it's that that allows us to see change, real change for what it is."

NOVA senior executive producer Paula Apsell— the creator of NOVA scienceNOW, a popular science news program — and her team of filmmakers compiled images, video and other information from some of the 120 Earth-observing satellites in orbit today to make the new film.

NOVA used information from the ocean monitoring Aqua satellite to use computer animation to show what water evaporating from the ocean at the equator could look like. The filmmakers also utilized data from the polar orbiting NPP Suomi satellite to show how the ice caps have changed through time.

While most Earth-observing satellites are still hard at work long past their expected life times, many of the Earth orbiters will need to be replaced in the next five or 10 years, Abdalati said. It's particularly important that these observations are continuous, Sellers added, because scientists need these satellites to see the broader view of the planet's unified systems.

NASA's fleet of Earth-observers got an upgrade this week with the launch of a new Landsat Data Continuity Mission satellite that will replace a satellite that will be retired in the next two years.

NOVA's two-hour documentary "Earth from Space" debuts Wednesday, Feb. 13, at 9 p.m./8 p.m. Central, on PBS (check local listings).

You can follow Space.com staff writer Miriam Kramer on Twitter @mirikramer. Follow Space.com on Twitter @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook  and  Google+. 

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William M. Ciesla, Forest Health Management International, Bugwood.org

This aerial photograph shows a western spruce budworm outbreak at Mount Hood National Forest, Oregon.

By Douglas Main
Our Amazing Planet

A new computer program detected a slow-motion decline, and subsequent revival, of forests in the Pacific Northwest in recent years. But what was behind this mysterious pattern? 

"It was, as it turns out, bugs," said Robert Kennedy, a remote sensing specialist at Boston University who designed the computer program, in a NASA statement.

Kennedy's program, called LandTrendr, can detect minute changes in the health of forests by analyzing wavelengths of light given off by the landscape and recorded in satellite images. Different types of vegetation reflect different wavelengths of light, often in ways that the naked eye can't detect.

In the case of the declining forests, Kennedy consulted with the U.S. Forest Service to confirm that the pattern of decline and rebirth detected by LandTrendr, and seen in several areas through the Northwest, was caused by mountain pine beetles. His program also detected a similar pattern of damage caused by the western spruce budworm.

Outbreaks of pine beetles have occurred in several areas, according to the release, including near Mount Hood in the 1980s, an outbreak that peaked in 1992 when the forest began to grow back. Another outbreak near Mount Rainier lasted 10 years, from its onset in 1994 until the insects killed all the trees and moved on in 2004. Pine beetles still pose a huge threat to forests throughout the West.

Kennedy's program also recognized a subtler decline of forests near these two mountains. Hiking to an area that seemed be in poor health based upon the program's analysis, Kennedy recently found an infestation of western spruce budworms. These insects eat the needles off of spruce trees. This won't kill trees immediately, but will if the insects return in following years, NASA reported.

LandTrendr is still in development, but has already changed the way the U.S. Forest Service monitors ecosystems in the Pacific Northwest, according to the NASA statement. Next, researchers aim to analyze the data in real-time, according to the release, so that, for example, they could contain an insect outbreak before it causes too much damage.

Reach Douglas Main at dmain@techmedianetwork.com. Follow him on Twitter @Douglas_Main. Follow OurAmazingPlanet on Twitter @OAPlanet. We're also on Facebook and Google+.

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