“Space Ventura,” Space Detective

This is an odd business opportunity, and one which Air and Space Evidence Ltd. looks keen and ready to exploit. Their work seems to identify a gap that civil local government services haven’t yet addressed: solving crimes using Earth Observation imagery. The company isn’t just focusing on capital crimes, such as murder (although this NewScientist story talks about […]

Pop Quiz answer

Several days ago, I posted these two pictures with a vaguely worded question: https://themadspaceball.wordpress.com/2013/08/09/one-of-these-things/ I promised an answer to that question and here it is: the top picture was taken from low earth orbit (LEO), the bottom from geosynchronous (GEO) orbit. How can one tell from just the pictures? Two big telltales exist in them. […]

Missed it, by that much.

In light of the Sakurajima volcanic eruption in Japan, I present to you a picture of the very active volcano. From January 2013. There don’t appear to be any other images yet of Sunday’s eruption. This image comes courtesy of the NASA Earth Observatory page. But it initially came to my attention from the Bad Astronomer page, […]

Why space matters: Imaging satellite operations, part 7 (the dishy part)

Last week, we found out that companies flying satellites, especially low earth orbiting (LEOs) need a few ground stations to send and receive data to satellite and payload in a timely manner. How can you tell there’s something space-y going on in your neighborhood? The most visible part of the ground system is the thing […]

Why space matters: Imaging satellite operations, part 6

In my last aside, I noted it was interesting the Hubble telescope was using a low earth orbit (LEO) to conduct its mission, considering some of the challenges inherent in such a low orbit. So let’s start with the first challenge. A low earth orbiting (LEO) satellite is going around the Earth really quickly. There […]