Satellites Going Green

The debate over climate change continues to rage, with some arguing that forecasted growth in the population will place strains on the supplies of fuel and food, triggering an increase in hydrocarbons as food production increases to keep up with demand. As energy needs increase to satisfy the global need for food, climate change will become a greater reality. The counterargument is that there is not enough scientific evidence to back up these forecasts, and computer models have not provided the level of accuracy to determine if climate change is not just a fear tactic. According to DeWayne Cecil, chief of science applications for the U.S. Geological Service’s (USGS) Global Change Program Office, “to pick one (climate change model) of those that is the best is not appropriate, because it depends on what region you are looking at and what kind of data you have for input, so it’s a very complicated process. Those kinds of decisions that have to be made with our best estimate on how a climate is changing for a region are being made now with those decisionmakers at the table with the scientist and engineers. I think that’s a huge improvement, especially in the United States.” Cecil acknowledges that “with ground sensors, coupled with satellite data, we can start looking at changes in greenhouse gases, changes in air temperature and changes in the precipitation patterns. Those are just a few ways that satellites are augmenting climate change data, and in some cases, satellites are the only or the best data that we have.”

Can Orbiting Assets Determine the Truth?

NASA’s studies to date have not drawn a clear global profile of carbon dioxide. For example, is there a direct relationship between greenhouse gas and the rise in the average global temperature? Scientists state that 40 percent of the non-human emissions of carbon dioxide stay in the atmosphere and the rest are absorbed by the oceans and the soil but cannot state with any certainty where the carbon is going on the land masses. An attempt was made to correct this. Funded by the United States, France, and Canada, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory was designed to make the first space-based measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide and better define the carbon gaps or “sinks” and monitor changes in them. Unfortunately, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, built by Orbital Sciences Corp. under contract to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was destroyed in a February launch failure of Orbital’s Taurus launch vehicle. The spacecraft also was to operate as part of the Earth Observing System Afternoon Constellation, or A-Train, a formation of six satellites that included NASA’s Aqua, CloudSat, Calipso, Parasol and Aura spacecraft. The formation was intended to enable researchers to correlate data collected by the spacecraft.

While the data that would have been collected by the Orbiting Carbon Observatory cannot be replicated entirely, Japan’s Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite (Gosat), reached orbit in January. The spacecraft, built by Mitsubishi and operated by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, will measure sources of carbon dioxide. Gosat will record greenhouse gas emissions in 56,000 locations across the globe while orbiting the planet once every three days. An initial analysis of carbon dioxide and methane concentrations has been obtained during testing and validation of the spacecraft. Once Gosat is fully operational, the data will be updated every three days and analyzed by researchers at the Japanese Environment Ministry and the Japanese National Institute for Environmental Studies before being distributed freely to scientists around the globe.

The United States government also is funding multiple programs that will contribute to monitoring efforts. The final Polar Operational Environmental Satellite (POES) was launched in February for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The spacecraft, NOAA-19, provides measurements of reflected solar and radiated thermal energy from land, sea, clouds and the atmosphere; atmospheric soundings of temperature and humidity; measurements of global sea surface temperature, aerosol distribution data, ozone concentration data and soil moisture data. Additionally, POES satellites provide direct broadcast of environmental data worldwide.

POES will be replaced by the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS), which combines weather satellite operations operated by NOAA and the U.S. Air Force. A series of spacecraft developed by prime contractor Northrop Grumman will provide data to the international community to support weather forecasting as well as continuity of critical data for monitoring, understanding and predicting climate change and assessing the impacts of climate change on seasonal and longer time scales. Subcontractor Raytheon was involved in the development on Visible/Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), the primary sensor for the operational NPOESS weather/climate satellites and NASA’s NPOESS Preparatory Project (NPP). Some of the VIIRS Environmental Data Records will help in understanding and modeling global climate change. NOAA works routinely with NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense on current development efforts and on “addressing strategic ways to manage the program more effectively,” says John Leslie, a spokesman for NOAA. “… Recent decisions have been made which provide NOAA a greater stake (in NPOESS) by using the data from the NPP satellite in an operational capacity. This is expected to provide NOAA with immediate improvements in its environmental satellite monitoring and imaging capabilities.”

Global Cooperation

Another effort, the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), will be built on existing observation systems. The program will connect producers of environmental data and decision support tools with end users to enhance the reality of Earth observation to global issues. More than 125 countries and organizations will provide the systems, services and expertise required to make the program work. According to Vladimir Gershenzon, director of ScanEX, a research and development center in Russia, “At present, three groups of national meteorological satellites operate in polar orbits; namely, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Polar Orbital Environmental Satellites and DMSP (Defense Meteorological Satellite Program), Eumetsat’s (the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites) MetOp satellites, and China’s FengYun-1D. MetOp-A was declared operational in May 2007, and the system eventually will consist of three polar orbiting satellites, with MetOp-B launched in the first half of 2012 and MetOp-C in 2018. The joint constellation of NPOESS and MetOp will provide global coverage from advanced atmospheric imaging and sounding instruments with a data refresh rate of about four to six hours.

“Even though the basic observations are essentially the same, the challenge is in accuracy,” says Mikael Rattenborg, director of operations, Eumetsat. “If you want to look at an identified climate signal, that is much, much more challenging for meteorology. … To find the climate signal, you need to have much more precisely calibrated instruments than what you use for normal meteorology. That’s the kind of challenges that we have at the moment. First of all, we don’t do climate forecasting. In a sense, NOAA has a much broader mandate than we have because they are responsible for the basic meteorological forecasting. They also now have, I think, a kind of a mandate for global climate monitoring and global climate forecasting. And they also have within their mandate to provide the satellite observation data. Eumetsat, as such, we are only providing the basic satellite data,” he says.

But the new satellites and partnerships will have Eumetsat set to play a key role in the battle against climate change. Meteosat is the centerpiece of Eumetsat’s next-generation meteorological satellite strategy. The first Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) satellite, MSG-1 was placed in orbit in 2002 and was followed by MSG-2 in 2005. MSG-3 is scheduled to launch in 2010 and MSG-4 in 2013. The Ocean Surface Topography Mission (OSTM)/Jason-2 satellite, launched in June, also will play a role in climate change monitoring. The satellite, a joint U.S.-European venture, will map the surface of 95 percent of Earth’s ice-free oceans and provide improved weather forecasting, enhanced hurricane prediction and a better understanding of ocean climate phenomena. Eumetsat also will have a role in ESA’s Global Monitoring Environment and Security (GMES) program. The organization will provide data and products for GMES under an agreement that runs from 2008 through 2010. All Eumetsat data and products will be made available free of charge to the five GMES Core Services: land core service, marine core service, emergency response support service, security and atmosphere monitoring.

Eumetsat also is reaching out to new space powers such as China and India. “We have [European] Council approval for a new agreement with the China Meteorological Administration (CMA) focusing on data exchange and dissemination which we have just signed,” Lars Prahm, director general of Eumetsat, said in August. “It means we will exchange all of our data with China’s meteorological agency, and we will get access to their data and distribute it to our user community. CMA will distribute Eumetsat data to users in Asia. This is a very fruitful cooperation. We have also signed a cooperation agreement with Russia. With India, we are also working very hard in this area, particularly in terms of ocean satellites.” With climate change becoming such a huge issue around the world, the work of organizations such as Eumetsat is becoming more important than ever. “There is a strong political wish to increase information about climate change,” says Prahm. “Actually, Eumetsat has had the world climate in its convention since 2001. Our inter-governmental convention is tasking Eumetsat to monitor climate and contribute to climate change detection. We are one of few international organizations having that in their key mandate. It is quite natural that we will increase our information related to climate change based on the increased importance of this issue.”

Actionable Climate Change Data Innovations

It is clear that there is this critical need today for data to be collected and assembled which can verify the reality of climate change and how it is impacting the survival of human civilization, and gains in computing power have brought in a new world of actionable climate change data. “The three R’s of the Industrial Age were reading, writing and arithmetic. The three R’s of the Information Age are richness, reach, and relevancy,” says Dave Stafford, vice president of federal government agencies for NPOESS prime contractor Northrop Grumman. “The questions are, ‘How do we unbundle the richness of the sensors we’ve designed and the reach that connectivity has afforded us, and how do you create new relevancy in the information age? And how do we take that concept of richness, relevancy and reach and repurpose that which we know and share it with the world on climate?’”

California’s Silicon Valley also is working climate change. In the first half of 2009, NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., signed a Space Act Agreement with Cisco Systems, which has invested $500 000 in the Planetary Skin project — a global information technology platform that will use Web-based tools. “We have a great deal of archived data and active data in NASA’s collection centers that can be unlocked and provided to the private sector, which in this case is Cisco Systems,” says Chris Potter, senior research scientist at Ames. Cisco likes to say it will “further unlock a global market. In this case the global market that we anticipate will be developed over time is carbon trading. NASA benefits by demonstrating that all this data can be used in a very practical way to open up opportunities across the world to do carbon trading in a new way. It furthers the use of our data sets and it helps us to build these partnerships with the private sector in ways that benefit them in their research and development.”

Simon Willis, Cisco’s joint author of Planetary Skin, says, “We started to look at the question of could you actually build a system that would monitor in real time carbon stocks and flows and, indeed, inputting the other environmental factors — land use, water, etc? Could you further bring together huge sets of data that were being gathered from various global sources in these areas, and present them in a usable way?” According to Potter, “there are many other countries, tropical countries and developing countries even, who are launching satellites who can play a part in this whole observing system that Cisco wants to link up, put together in this Planetary Skin.”

Green Satellites

The satellite sector also is leading the way to become greener. The industry, with its innovative engineers and managers, is coming up with solutions to help preserve the planet’s long-term future. “When you see a satellite going up in space you see a lot of smoke, so they say they (satellites) make a lot of pollution; but that smoke is only for 117 seconds out of the lifetime of a satellite, which is 15 years,” says Giuliano Berretta, chairman and CEO of Eutelsat. “The first thing that struck me when I was considering (green satellites) — between 70 to 75 percent of Eutelsat’s revenue comes from TV, so that the first thing that we looked at was TV. The most important carbon footprint saving is in TV, which is a receiving only activity from the consumer. A satellite with the only transmission point 36,000 kilometers from the Earth and completely supplied power by solar panels produces no emissions or consumption at all. The only consumption is when the rocket from the instance that it leaves the ground and when it goes out of the atmosphere, and in that case, with Arianespace, is less than 120 seconds and compare that to a medium-sized car for 15 years, and considering that an Ariane brings up two satellites, and you have divided the two by the total consumption.”

Romain Bausch, president and CEO of SES, says “Satellites are not doing emissions when they are transmitting. If you take the United Kingdom, there are 1,100 UHF transmitters that provide terrestrial TV, and if you only take 50 out these 1,100 — the 50 most powerful transmitters — they consume 54 megawatts of electricity. This is producing more than 50,000 tons of [carbon dioxide] per annum. The message is very clear of the very green approach to transmitting TV by using satellites.” While the launch of the satellite and the satellite itself are insignificant producers of carbon dioxide, but what can a satellite operator do to reduce carbon emissions? According to Bausch, “You have to use electricity to do the tracking and control of the satellite and so the satellite operator is emitting obviously the [carbon dioxide]. According to our internal survey, we emitted 40,000 tons of [carbon dioxide] in 2008 to operate the satellite network for global coverage. We are operating 40 satellites and this is the emissions. You can compare this to someone in the United Kingdom who is running an analog terrestrial network TV transmitter network and based on a [U.K. Case4Space study and other sources], the terrestrial TV (analog) network is emitting 250,000 tons of [carbon dioxide]. Our objective is to have as light of a carbon footprint as possible. For more than 10 years we have used co-generation for our electrical needs.”

In March 2007,BSkyB launched the world’s first auto-standby for set-top boxes, downloading it to 4 million boxes. When the upgrade is completed in July, this is expected to save customers an estimated total each year of $31.8 million on their energy bills and 90,000 tons of carbon dioxide – almost twice Sky’s footprint and around 30 percent more than previous versions. Sky also is cutting the energy use of new satellite dishes by around 10 percent. VSAT terminals are becoming greener as well. “We decided that we would produce the first green VSAT so that no polluting materials will be used at all in the VSAT,” Josh Levinberg, co-founder of Gilat, says. “In fact, I’m more rigorous than the European standards. So we came out with a ‘Total Green VSAT’ which complied with those standards. “

There also have been improvements in the carbon emissions coming from rocket vehicles. “Normal rocket propellants are partially green. If you take the Ariane, it is done with a cryogenic engine which is an oxygen and hydrogen engine,” says Berretta. “Arianespace is claiming that only 10 percent of solid rocket fuel is oil based and for their Ariane 5 rocket and 67 percent of the carbon emitting remains trapped in water vapor rather than being released in the atmosphere.”

NASA has sought to develop a complete green bleeding edge rocket propellant technology. Northrop Grumman has developed and tested the TR408 second-generation oxygen/methane 100-pound reaction control engine (RCE). The design represents an evolution in Northrop Grumman’s spacecraft engines, leveraging data from tests conducted in vacuum conditions in 2007. Advances include an integrated igniter, an electroformed close-out of the regeneratively-cooled chamber and a large area ratio nozzle.

“Liquid oxygen and liquid methane are not hypergolic. They’re environmentally friendly as well,” says Gordon Dressler, chief engineer at Northrop Grumman’s Propulsion and Fluid Products Center. “They’re very nice propellants, and it raises the question of why hasn’t the United States’ rocket industry done further work in developing these in rocket engine applications? I think the methane liquid oxygen rocket engine technology that we’re helping to develop will have a particular benefit to enable the global satellite industry to get their vehicles on orbit.”

Meeting the Challenge Head On

The satellite industry is demonstrating its ability to tackle the challenges of climate change with visionary and innovative approaches. Satellites are the key to monitoring climate change and showcasing green technologies. Accurate data generated by satellites using green technology to power systems and processes will showcase the innovation contribution of the satellite industry for sometime to come. In addition, the scientific community working with private enterprises will determine how to aggregate the data to serve as a living nervous system to create new value, to mitigate the effects of climate change, or to change the direction of perceived trends.

Richard Theodor Kusiolek has been an early innovator of wireless technologies in Northern California’s Silicon Valley with digital battlefields and the High Tech Multimedia City. Kusiolek is chairman and president of TransGlobalNet, a management consultancy specializing in strategic technical marketing. He can be reached at [email protected]

Richard Theodor Kusiolek has been an early innovator of wireless technologies in Northern California’s Silicon Valley with digital battlefields and the High Tech Multimedia City. Kusiolek is chairman and president of TransGlobalNet, a management consultancy specializing in strategic technical marketing. He can be reached at [email protected]

Richard Theodor Kusiolek has been an early innovator of wireless technologies in Northern California’s Silicon Valley with digital battlefields and the High Tech Multimedia City. Kusiolek is chairman and president of TransGlobalNet, a management consultancy specializing in strategic technical marketing. He can be reached at [email protected]

Richard Theodor Kusiolek has been an early innovator of wireless technologies in Northern California’s Silicon Valley with digital battlefields and the High Tech Multimedia City. Kusiolek is chairman and president of TransGlobalNet, a management consultancy specializing in strategic technical marketing. He can be reached at [email protected]

Richard Theodor Kusiolek has been an early innovator of wireless technologies in Northern California’s Silicon Valley with digital battlefields and the High Tech Multimedia City. Kusiolek is chairman and president of TransGlobalNet, a management consultancy specializing in strategic technical marketing. He can be reached at [email protected]

Richard Theodor Kusiolek has been an early innovator of wireless technologies in Northern California’s Silicon Valley with digital battlefields and the High Tech Multimedia City. Kusiolek is chairman and president of TransGlobalNet, a management consultancy specializing in strategic technical marketing. He can be reached at [email protected]

Richard Theodor Kusiolek has been an early innovator of wireless technologies in Northern California’s Silicon Valley with digital battlefields and the High Tech Multimedia City. Kusiolek is chairman and president of TransGlobalNet, a management consultancy specializing in strategic technical marketing. He can be reached at [email protected]

Richard Theodor Kusiolek has been an early innovator of wireless technologies in Northern California’s Silicon Valley with digital battlefields and the High Tech Multimedia City. Kusiolek is chairman and president of TransGlobalNet, a management consultancy specializing in strategic technical marketing. He can be reached at [email protected]

Richard Theodor Kusiolek has been an early innovator of wireless technologies in Northern California’s Silicon Valley with digital battlefields and the High Tech Multimedia City. Kusiolek is chairman and president of TransGlobalNet, a management consultancy specializing in strategic technical marketing. He can be reached at [email protected]

Richard Theodor Kusiolek has been an early innovator of wireless technologies in Northern California’s Silicon Valley with digital battlefields and the High Tech Multimedia City. Kusiolek is chairman and president of TransGlobalNet, a management consultancy specializing in strategic technical marketing. He can be reached at [email protected]