1.
The Adecco Group
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For 2009, it ranked 839th on the Fortune 1000. Formerly MPS Group Inc. its brands are a subsidiary of the Swiss firm Adecco Group, Adecco Group North America was founded in 1982 as Accustaff Incorporated in Jacksonville and changed its name to J, Inc. in 2002. With revenues of US$2.2 billion in 2008, the company had clients in over 200 office locations, the professional services division provides staffing and recruitment services in the disciplines of accounting and finance, law, engineering, property and health care. MPS Group sponsored the MPS Group Championships, a Womens Tennis Association event held in Ponte Vedra Beach, the tournament was discontinued in 2011 due to scheduling changes for WTA Tour spring events. On October 20,2009, the company announced it was being acquired by Swiss company Adecco Group for US$1.3 billion in cash, Jacksonville became Adeccos center for professional staffing in North America. The merger was completed in the first quarter of 2010
2.
Kamchatka Peninsula
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The Kamchatka Peninsula is a 1, 250-kilometre-long peninsula in the Russian Far East, with an area of about 270,000 km2. It lies between the Pacific Ocean to the east and the Sea of Okhotsk to the west, immediately offshore along the Pacific coast of the peninsula runs the 10, 500-metre deep Kuril–Kamchatka Trench. The Kamchatka Peninsula, the Commander Islands, and Karaginsky Island constitute the Kamchatka Krai of the Russian Federation, the vast majority of the 322,079 inhabitants are ethnic Russians, but there are also about 13,000 Koryaks. More than half of the lives in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky and nearby Yelizovo. The Kamchatka peninsula contains the volcanoes of Kamchatka, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Kamchatka receives up to 2,700 mm of precipitation per year. The summers are cool, and the winters tend to be rather stormy though rarely producing lightning. Politically, the forms part of Kamchatka Krai. The southern tip is called Cape Lopatka, the circular bay to the north of this on the Pacific side is Avacha Bay with the capital, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. North up the Pacific side, the four peninsulas are called Shipunsky Point, Kronotsky Point, Kamchatsky Point, North of Ozernoy is the large Karaginsky Bay, which features Karaginsky Island. Northeast of this lies Korfa Bay with the town of Tilichiki, on the opposite side is the Shelikhov Gulf. The Kamchatka or Central Range forms the spine of the peninsula, along the southeast coast runs the Vostochny or Eastern Range. Between these lies the central valley, the Kamchatka River rises northwest of Avacha and flows north down the central valley, turning east near Klyuchi to enter the Pacific south of Kamchatsky Point at Ust-Kamchatsk. In the nineteenth century a trail led west from near Klychi over the mountains to the Tegil river, North of Tegil is Koryak Okrug. South of the Tegil is the Icha River, just south of the headwaters of the Kamchatka, the Bistraya River curves southwest to enter the Sea of Okhotsk at Bolsheretsk, which once served as a port connecting the peninsula to Okhotsk. South of the Bistraya flows the Golygina River, another highway connects local capital with Bolsheretsk. Bus service is available on both roads, most other roads are gravel-covered or coverless ground, requiring off-road capable vehicles. There is semi-regular passenger transportation with aircraft, the obvious circular area in the central valley is the Klyuchevskaya Sopka, an isolated volcanic group southeast of the curve of the Kamchatka River. West of Kronotsky Point is the Kronotsky Biosphere Reserve with the Valley of Geysers, at the southern tip is the Southern Kamchatka Wildlife Refuge with Kurile Lake
3.
Hurricane Katrina
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Hurricane Katrina was the costliest natural disaster and one of the five deadliest hurricanes in the history of the United States. The storm is ranked as the third most intense United States landfalling tropical cyclone. Overall, at least 1,245 people died in the hurricane and subsequent floods, total property damage was estimated at $108 billion, roughly four times the damage wrought by Hurricane Andrew in 1992 in the United States. Early the following day, the new depression intensified into Tropical Storm Katrina, the cyclone headed generally westward toward Florida and strengthened into a hurricane only two hours before making landfall at Hallandale Beach and Aventura on August 25. After very briefly weakening to a storm, Katrina emerged into the Gulf of Mexico on August 26. The storm caused severe destruction along the Gulf coast from central Florida to Texas, much of it due to the storm surge, severe property damage occurred in coastal areas, such as Mississippi beachfront towns, over 90 percent of these were flooded. Boats and casino barges rammed buildings, pushing cars and houses inland, over fifty breaches in New Orleanss hurricane surge protection were the cause of the majority of the death and destruction during Katrina on August 29,2005. Eventually 80% of the city and large tracts of neighboring parishes became flooded, according to a modeling exercise conducted by the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers, two-thirds of the deaths in Greater New Orleans were due to levee and floodwall failure. All of the studies concluded that the USACE, the designers and builders of the levee system as mandated by the Flood Control Act of 1965, is responsible. This is mainly due to a decision to use shorter steel sheet pilings in an effort to save money, exactly ten years after Katrina, J. Many other government officials were criticized for their responses, especially New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, several agencies including the United States Coast Guard, National Hurricane Center, and National Weather Service were commended for their actions. They provided accurate hurricane weather tracking forecasts with sufficient lead time, Hurricane Katrina formed as Tropical Depression Twelve over the southeastern Bahamas on August 23,2005, as the result of an interaction of a tropical wave and the remains of Tropical Depression Ten. It strengthened into Tropical Storm Katrina on the morning of August 24, the tropical storm moved towards Florida, and became a hurricane only two hours before making landfall between Hallandale Beach and Aventura on the morning of August 25. The storm weakened over land, but it regained hurricane status about one hour after entering the Gulf of Mexico, on August 27, the storm reached Category 3 intensity on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale, becoming the third major hurricane of the season. An eyewall replacement cycle disrupted the intensification, but caused the storm to nearly double in size, the storm rapidly intensified after entering the Gulf, growing from a Category 3 hurricane to a Category 5 hurricane in just nine hours. This rapid growth was due to the movement over the unusually warm waters of the Loop Current. Katrina attained Category 5 status on the morning of August 28 and reached its peak strength at 1800 UTC that day, with sustained winds of 175 mph. However, this record was broken by Hurricane Rita
4.
Payload
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Payload is the carrying capacity of an aircraft or launch vehicle, usually measured in terms of weight. Depending on the nature of the flight or mission, the payload of a vehicle may include cargo, passengers, flight crew, munitions, scientific instruments or experiments, extra fuel, when optionally carried, is also considered part of the payload. In a commercial context, payload may refer only to revenue-generating cargo or paying passengers, for a rocket, the payload can be a satellite, space probe, or spacecraft carrying humans, animals, or cargo. For a ballistic missile, the payload is one or more warheads and related systems, the fraction of payload to the total liftoff weight of the air or spacecraft is known as the payload fraction. When the weight of the payload and fuel are considered together, in spacecraft, mass fraction is normally used, which is the ratio of payload to everything else, including the rocket structure. There is a natural trade-off between the payload and the range of an aircraft, a payload range diagram illustrates the trade-off. The top horizontal line represents the maximum payload and it is limited structurally by maximum zero-fuel weight of the aircraft. Maximum payload is the difference between maximum zero-fuel weight and operational empty weight, moving left-to-right along the line shows the constant maximum payload as the range increases. More fuel needs to be added for more range, the vertical line represents the range at which the combined weight of the aircraft, maximum payload and needed fuel reaches the maximum take-off weight of the aircraft. If the range is increased beyond that point, payload has to be sacrificed for fuel, the maximum take-off weight is limited by a combination of the maximum net power of the engines and the lift/drag ratio of the wings. The diagonal line after the point shows how reducing the payload allows increasing the fuel when taking off with the maximum take-off weight. The second kink in the curve represents the point at which the fuel capacity is reached. Flying further than that point means that the payload has to be reduced further, the absolute range is thus the range at which an aircraft can fly with maximum possible fuel without carrying any payload.314 m3 and 2 x 0.414 m3 Envelope, each 1. So even when the airplane has been loaded with its maximum payload that the wings can support, launch and transport system differ not only on the payload that can be carried but also in the stresses and other factors placed on the payload. The payload must not only be lifted to its target, it must also arrive safely, to ensure this the payload, such as a warhead or satellite, is designed to withstand certain amounts of various types of punishment on the way to its destination. Most aircraft payloads are carried within the fuselage for similar reasons, outsize cargo may require a fuselage with unusual proportions, such as the Super Guppy. The various constraints placed on the system can be roughly categorized into those that cause physical damage to the payload. Heavy-lift launch vehicle Medium-lift launch vehicle Tsiolkovsky rocket equation Shannon Ackert, using the Payload/Range and Takeoff Field Length Charts in the Airplane Characteristics for Airport Planning Documents
5.
Geocentric orbit
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A geocentric orbit or Earth orbit involves any object orbiting the Earth, such as the Moon or artificial satellites. In 1997 NASA estimated there were approximately 2,465 artificial satellite orbiting the Earth and 6,216 pieces of space debris as tracked by the Goddard Space Flight Center. Over 16,291 previously launched objects have decayed into the Earths atmosphere, altitude as used here, the height of an object above the average surface of the Earths oceans. Analemma a term in astronomy used to describe the plot of the positions of the Sun on the celestial sphere throughout one year, apogee is the farthest point that a satellite or celestial body can go from Earth, at which the orbital velocity will be at its minimum. Eccentricity a measure of how much an orbit deviates from a perfect circle, eccentricity is strictly defined for all circular and elliptical orbits, and parabolic and hyperbolic trajectories. Equatorial plane as used here, an imaginary plane extending from the equator on the Earth to the celestial sphere, escape velocity as used here, the minimum velocity an object without propulsion needs to have to move away indefinitely from the Earth. An object at this velocity will enter a parabolic trajectory, above this velocity it will enter a hyperbolic trajectory, impulse the integral of a force over the time during which it acts. Inclination the angle between a plane and another plane or axis. In the sense discussed here the reference plane is the Earths equatorial plane, orbital characteristics the six parameters of the Keplerian elements needed to specify that orbit uniquely. Orbital period as defined here, time it takes a satellite to make one orbit around the Earth. Perigee is the nearest approach point of a satellite or celestial body from Earth, sidereal day the time it takes for a celestial object to rotate 360°. For the Earth this is,23 hours,56 minutes,4.091 seconds, solar time as used here, the local time as measured by a sundial. Velocity an objects speed in a particular direction, since velocity is defined as a vector, both speed and direction are required to define it. The following is a list of different geocentric orbit classifications, Low Earth orbit - Geocentric orbits ranging in altitude from 160 kilometers to 2,000 kilometres above mean sea level. At 160 km, one revolution takes approximately 90 minutes, medium Earth orbit - Geocentric orbits with altitudes at apogee ranging between 2,000 kilometres and that of the geosynchronous orbit at 35,786 kilometres. Geosynchronous orbit - Geocentric circular orbit with an altitude of 35,786 kilometres, the period of the orbit equals one sidereal day, coinciding with the rotation period of the Earth. The speed is approximately 3,000 metres per second, high Earth orbit - Geocentric orbits with altitudes at apogee higher than that of the geosynchronous orbit. A special case of high Earth orbit is the elliptical orbit
6.
NASA
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President Dwight D. Eisenhower established NASA in 1958 with a distinctly civilian orientation encouraging peaceful applications in space science. The National Aeronautics and Space Act was passed on July 29,1958, disestablishing NASAs predecessor, the new agency became operational on October 1,1958. Since that time, most US space exploration efforts have led by NASA, including the Apollo Moon landing missions, the Skylab space station. Currently, NASA is supporting the International Space Station and is overseeing the development of the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, the agency is also responsible for the Launch Services Program which provides oversight of launch operations and countdown management for unmanned NASA launches. NASA shares data with various national and international such as from the Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite. Since 2011, NASA has been criticized for low cost efficiency, from 1946, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics had been experimenting with rocket planes such as the supersonic Bell X-1. In the early 1950s, there was challenge to launch a satellite for the International Geophysical Year. An effort for this was the American Project Vanguard, after the Soviet launch of the worlds first artificial satellite on October 4,1957, the attention of the United States turned toward its own fledgling space efforts. This led to an agreement that a new federal agency based on NACA was needed to conduct all non-military activity in space. The Advanced Research Projects Agency was created in February 1958 to develop technology for military application. On July 29,1958, Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, a NASA seal was approved by President Eisenhower in 1959. Elements of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency and the United States Naval Research Laboratory were incorporated into NASA, earlier research efforts within the US Air Force and many of ARPAs early space programs were also transferred to NASA. In December 1958, NASA gained control of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA has conducted many manned and unmanned spaceflight programs throughout its history. Some missions include both manned and unmanned aspects, such as the Galileo probe, which was deployed by astronauts in Earth orbit before being sent unmanned to Jupiter, the experimental rocket-powered aircraft programs started by NACA were extended by NASA as support for manned spaceflight. This was followed by a space capsule program, and in turn by a two-man capsule program. This goal was met in 1969 by the Apollo program, however, reduction of the perceived threat and changing political priorities almost immediately caused the termination of most of these plans. NASA turned its attention to an Apollo-derived temporary space laboratory, to date, NASA has launched a total of 166 manned space missions on rockets, and thirteen X-15 rocket flights above the USAF definition of spaceflight altitude,260,000 feet. The X-15 was an NACA experimental rocket-powered hypersonic research aircraft, developed in conjunction with the US Air Force, the design featured a slender fuselage with fairings along the side containing fuel and early computerized control systems
7.
Terra (satellite)
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Terra is a multi-national NASA scientific research satellite in a Sun-synchronous orbit around the Earth. It is the flagship of the Earth Observing System, the name Terra comes from the Latin word for Earth. The satellite was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on December 18,1999, aboard an Atlas IIAS vehicle and it was placed into a near-polar, sun-synchronous orbit at an altitude of 705km, with a 10, 30am descending node. Studies have used instruments on Terra to examine trends in global carbon monoxide, the data collected by Terra will ultimately become a new, 15-year global data set. In June and October 2008 the spacecraft was targeted by hackers who gained unauthorized access to its command and control systems, aqua Aura Man-made structures visible from space NASA Terra site
8.
Aqua (satellite)
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Aqua is a multi-national NASA scientific research satellite in orbit around the Earth, studying the precipitation, evaporation, and cycling of water. It is the major component of the Earth Observing System preceded by Terra. The name Aqua comes from the Latin word for water, the satellite was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on May 4,2002, aboard a Delta II rocket. Aqua is on a Sun-synchronous orbit and it flies as the second in the satellite formation called the A Train with several other satellites. Furnished by the National Space Development Agency of Japan, MODIS — Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, also measures cloud properties and radiative energy flux, also aerosol properties, land cover and land use change, fires and volcanoes. This instrument is also aboard Terra, aMSU-A — Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit — measures atmospheric temperature and humidity. AIRS — Atmospheric Infrared Sounder — measures atmospheric temperature and humidity, land, HSB — Humidity Sounder for Brazil — VHF band equipment measuring atmospheric humidity. Furnished by Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais of Brazil, the HSB instrument has been in survival mode since 2/5/2003. CERES — Clouds and the Earths Radiant Energy System, Flying Models 3 and 4, the Aqua spacecraft has a mass of about 2,850 kilograms, plus propellant of about 230 kilograms. Stowed, the satellite is 2.68 m x 2.49 m x 6.49 m. Deployed, Aqua is 4.81 m x 16.70 m x 8.04 m. Terra Aura NASA Aqua site Aqua Mission Profile by NASAs Solar System Exploration Mission Control Tunes Up Aquas Orbit, August 20,2009
9.
Cloud cover
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Cloud cover refers to the fraction of the sky obscured by clouds when observed from a particular location. Okta is the unit of measurement of the cloud cover. The cloud cover is correlated to the duration as the least cloudy locales are the sunniest ones while the cloudiest areas are the least sunny places. The global cloud cover averages around 0.68 when analysing clouds with optical depth larger than 0.1 and this value is lower when considering clouds with an optical depth larger than 2 and higher when counting subvisible cirrus clouds. Clouds play multiple roles in the climate system. In particular, being bright objects in the part of the solar spectrum, they efficiently reflect light to space. Cloud cover thus plays an important role in the balance of the atmosphere. Cloud cover values only vary by 0.03 from year to year, whereas the local, most data sets agree on the fact that the land is covered by 0. 10-0.15 less cloud than the oceans. Lastly, there is a variation in the cloud cover. Almost the same variation is found 20°S, on the other hand, in the storm regions of the Southern Hemisphere midlatitudes were found to have with 0. 15-0.25 more cloudiness than the global mean at 60°S. On average, about 52% of Earth is cloud-covered at any moment, some regions are almost always cloudy such as the Amazon Rainforest and some others are almost always clear such as the Sahara Desert
10.
Earth's energy budget
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Earths energy budget accounts for the energy Earth receives from the Sun. Much of this energy is lost when the earth re-radiates it back into space. This system is made up of water, ice, atmosphere, rocky crust. Quantifying changes in these amounts is required to model the Earths climate. Received radiation is distributed over the planet, because the Sun heats equatorial regions more than polar regions. When the incoming energy is balanced by an equal flow of heat to space. Disturbances of Earths radiative equilibrium, such as an increase of greenhouse gases, however, Earths energy balance and heat fluxes depend on many factors, such as atmospheric composition, the albedo of surface properties, cloud cover and vegetation and land use patterns. Changes in surface temperature due to Earths energy budget do not occur instantaneously, due to the inertia of the oceans and the cryosphere. The net heat flux is buffered primarily by becoming part of the heat content. To quantify Earths heat budget or heat balance, let the insolation received at the top of the atmosphere be 100 units, as shown in the accompanying illustration. Called the albedo of Earth, around 35 units are reflected back to space,27 from the top of clouds,2 from snow and ice-covered areas, the 65 remaining units are absorbed,14 within the atmosphere and 51 by the Earth’s surface. These 51 units are radiated to space in the form of radiation,17 directly radiated to space and 34 absorbed by the atmosphere. The 48 units absorbed by the atmosphere are finally radiated back to space and these 65 units balance the 65 units absorbed from the sun, thereby demonstrating no net gain of energy by the Earth. The total amount of energy received per second at the top of Earths atmosphere is measured in watts and is given by the solar constant times the area of the Earth. Because the surface area of a sphere is four times the surface area of a sphere. Since the absorption varies with location as well as with diurnal, seasonal and annual variations and this gives the earth a mean net albedo of 0.29. The geothermal heat flux from the Earths interior is estimated to be 47 terawatts and this comes to 0.087 watt/square metre, which represents only 0. 027% of Earths total energy budget at the surface, which is dominated by 173,000 terawatts of incoming solar radiation. Earlier, Joseph Fourier had claimed that deep space radiation was significant in an often cited as the first on the greenhouse effect
11.
Atmosphere of Earth
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The atmosphere of Earth is the layer of gases, commonly known as air, that surrounds the planet Earth and is retained by Earths gravity. The atmosphere of Earth protects life on Earth by absorbing solar radiation, warming the surface through heat retention. By volume, dry air contains 78. 09% nitrogen,20. 95% oxygen,0. 93% argon,0. 04% carbon dioxide, and small amounts of other gases. Air also contains an amount of water vapor, on average around 1% at sea level. The atmosphere has a mass of about 5. 15×1018 kg, the atmosphere becomes thinner and thinner with increasing altitude, with no definite boundary between the atmosphere and outer space. The Kármán line, at 100 km, or 1. 57% of Earths radius, is used as the border between the atmosphere and outer space. Atmospheric effects become noticeable during atmospheric reentry of spacecraft at an altitude of around 120 km, several layers can be distinguished in the atmosphere, based on characteristics such as temperature and composition. The study of Earths atmosphere and its processes is called atmospheric science, early pioneers in the field include Léon Teisserenc de Bort and Richard Assmann. The three major constituents of air, and therefore of Earths atmosphere, are nitrogen, oxygen, water vapor accounts for roughly 0. 25% of the atmosphere by mass. The remaining gases are often referred to as gases, among which are the greenhouse gases, principally carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide. Filtered air includes trace amounts of other chemical compounds. Various industrial pollutants also may be present as gases or aerosols, such as chlorine, fluorine compounds, sulfur compounds such as hydrogen sulfide and sulfur dioxide may be derived from natural sources or from industrial air pollution. In general, air pressure and density decrease with altitude in the atmosphere, however, temperature has a more complicated profile with altitude, and may remain relatively constant or even increase with altitude in some regions. In this way, Earths atmosphere can be divided into five main layers, excluding the exosphere, Earth has four primary layers, which are the troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, and thermosphere. It extends from the exobase, which is located at the top of the thermosphere at an altitude of about 700 km above sea level, to about 10,000 km where it merges into the solar wind. This layer is composed of extremely low densities of hydrogen, helium and several heavier molecules including nitrogen, oxygen. The atoms and molecules are so far apart that they can travel hundreds of kilometers without colliding with one another, thus, the exosphere no longer behaves like a gas, and the particles constantly escape into space. These free-moving particles follow ballistic trajectories and may migrate in and out of the magnetosphere or the solar wind, the exosphere is located too far above Earth for any meteorological phenomena to be possible
12.
Black body
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A black body is an idealized physical body that absorbs all incident electromagnetic radiation, regardless of frequency or angle of incidence. A white body is one with a surface reflects all incident rays completely and uniformly in all directions. A black body in thermal equilibrium emits electromagnetic radiation called black-body radiation, the radiation is emitted according to Plancks law, meaning that it has a spectrum that is determined by the temperature alone, not by the bodys shape or composition. A black body in equilibrium has two notable properties, It is an ideal emitter, at every frequency, it emits as much energy as – or more energy than – any other body at the same temperature. It is an emitter, the energy is radiated isotropically. An approximate realization of a surface is a hole in the wall of a large enclosure. Any light entering the hole is reflected indefinitely or absorbed inside and is unlikely to re-emerge, the radiation confined in such an enclosure may or may not be in thermal equilibrium, depending upon the nature of the walls and the other contents of the enclosure. Real materials emit energy at a fraction—called the emissivity—of black-body energy levels, by definition, a black body in thermal equilibrium has an emissivity of ε =1.0. A source with lower emissivity independent of frequency often is referred to as a gray body, construction of black bodies with emissivity as close to one as possible remains a topic of current interest. I shall call such bodies perfectly black, or, more briefly, a more modern definition drops the reference to infinitely small thicknesses, An ideal body is now defined, called a blackbody. A blackbody allows all incident radiation to pass into it and internally absorbs all the incident radiation and this is true for radiation of all wavelengths and for all angles of incidence. Hence the blackbody is a perfect absorber for all incident radiation and this section describes some concepts developed in connection with black bodies. A widely used model of a surface is a small hole in a cavity with walls that are opaque to radiation. Radiation incident on the hole will pass into the cavity, and is unlikely to be re-emitted if the cavity is large. The hole is not quite a perfect black surface — in particular, if the wavelength of the incident radiation is longer than the diameter of the hole, part will be reflected. Similarly, even in perfect equilibrium, the radiation inside a finite-sized cavity will not have an ideal Planck spectrum for wavelengths comparable to or larger than the size of the cavity. Suppose the cavity is held at a fixed temperature T and the radiation trapped inside the enclosure is at equilibrium with the enclosure. The hole in the enclosure will allow some radiation to escape, if the hole is small, radiation passing in and out of the hole has negligible effect upon the equilibrium of the radiation inside the cavity
13.
Suomi NPP
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Originally intended as a pathfinder for the NPOESS programme, which was to have replaced NOAAs Polar Operational Environmental Satellites and the U. S. Its instruments provide climate measurements that continue prior observations by NASAs Earth Observing System, the satellite is named after Verner E. Suomi, a meteorologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The name was announced on January 24,2012, three months after the satellites launch, the satellite was launched from Space Launch Complex 2W at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California by a United Launch Alliance Delta II 7920-10C on October 28,2011. The satellite was placed into a sun-synchronous orbit 824 km above the Earth, NPOESS Preparatory Project is intended to bridge the gap between old and new systems by flying new instruments, on a new satellite bus, using a new ground data network. The spacecraft was launched 28 October 2011 from Vandenberg Air Force Base via a Delta II in the 7920-10 configuration, additionally, the rocket deployed four CubeSats as a part of NASA ELaNa III manifest. The VIIRS sensor on board the spacecraft acquired its first measurements of Earth on November 21,2011 and that date was chosen because it was a fairly sunny day in most of North America. The Suomi NPP is the first in a new generation of satellites intended to replace the Earth Observing System satellites, the satellite orbits the Earth about 14 times each day
14.
Joint Polar Satellite System
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Joint Polar Satellite System is the latest generation of U. S. polar-orbiting, non-geosynchronous, environmental satellites. JPSS will provide the global environmental data used in weather prediction models for forecasts. JPSS will aid in fulfilling the mission of the U. S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the JPSS is developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who is responsible for operation of JPSS. Two satellites are planned for the JPSS constellation of satellites, JPSS satellites will be flown and the scientific data from JPSS will be processed by the JPSS - Common Ground System. JPSS was created by the White House in February 2010 following the dissolution of the National Polar-orbiting Environmental Satellite System program. DWSS was cancelled in April 2012, until a long term replacement plan is put in place, the military will continue to rely on the Air Force Defense Meteorological Satellite Program constellation of satellites. Information about our planet helps the nation plan, predict, respond, JPSS will replace the current Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellites, managed by NOAA and the ground processing component of both POES and the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program. Operational environmental requirements from polar-orbit are also met by the NPOESS Preparatory Project, the JPSS-1 spacecraft is based upon the design of the NPP satellite, with a different communications design for downlinking the raw, unprocessed data back to Earth. PSS Sensors/Instruments, The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite takes global visible and infrared observations of land, ocean, the Cross-track Infrared Sounder will produce high-resolution, three-dimensional temperature, pressure, and moisture profiles. These profiles will be used to weather forecasting models. Over longer timescales, they help improve understanding of climate phenomena such as El Niño. Ozone Mapper Profiler Suite an advanced suite of three instruments, extends the 25-plus year total-ozone and ozone-profile records. These records are used by ozone-assessment researchers and policy makers to track the health of the ozone layer, the improved vertical resolution of OMPS data products allows for better testing and monitoring of the complex chemistry involved in ozone destruction near the troposphere. OMPS products, when combined with cloud predictions, also produce better ultraviolet index forecasts. Clouds and Earths Radiant Energy System senses both solar-reflected and Earth-emitted radiation from the top of the atmosphere to the Earths surface, both are developed by Raytheon Intelligence and Information Systems. The IDPS will process JPSS satellite data to provide environmental data products to NOAA, the IDPS will process EDRs beginning with the NPOESS Preparatory Project, slated to launch in October 2011 and continue through the lifetime of the JPSS and DWSS systems. In addition, the C3S provides the globally distributed ground assets necessary to collect and transport mission, telemetry, suomi NPP was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on 28 October 2011 at 09,48 GMT. The first Joint Polar Satellite System satellite - JPSS1 will be launched in 2017 aboard a Delta II rocket, ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder, CO is the spacecraft contractor for both the JPSS-1 satellite and the Ozone instrument on the JPSS program and NPP
15.
Aral Sea
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The Aral Sea was an endorheic lake lying between Kazakhstan in the north and Uzbekistan in the south. The name roughly translates as Sea of Islands, referring to over 1,100 islands that once dotted its waters, in the Turkic languages aral means island, the Aral Sea drainage basin encompasses Uzbekistan and parts of Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Satellite images taken by NASA in August 2014 revealed that for the first time in history the eastern basin of the Aral Sea had completely dried up. The eastern basin is now called the Aralkum Desert, in an ongoing effort in Kazakhstan to save and replenish the North Aral Sea, a dam project was completed in 2005, in 2008, the water level in this lake had risen by 12 m compared to 2003. Salinity has dropped, and fish are found in sufficient numbers for some fishing to be viable. The maximum depth of the North Aral Sea is 42 m, the shrinking of the Aral Sea has been called one of the planets worst environmental disasters. The regions once-prosperous fishing industry has been destroyed, bringing unemployment. The Aral Sea region is heavily polluted, with consequential serious public health problems. The historical documents of the development of the Aral Sea have added by UNESCO to its Memory of the World Register as a source to study this environmental tragedy. The Aral Sea formed about 5.5 million years ago due to a fall in sea level, the Syr Darya formed a large lake in the Kyzyl Kum during the Pliocene known as the Mynbulak depression. Most of the area around the Aral Sea was inhabited by nomads who left few written records. However, the Oxus delta to the south has a history under the name of Khwarezm. It used to be the westernmost border of Tang dynasty China, Russian naval presence on the Aral Sea started in 1847, with the founding of Raimsk, which was soon renamed Fort Aralsk, near the mouth of the Syr Darya. Soon, the Imperial Russian Navy started deploying its vessels on the sea, owing to the Aral Sea basin not being connected to other bodies of water, the vessels had to be disassembled in Orenburg on the Ural River, shipped overland to Aralsk, and then reassembled. The first two ships, assembled in 1847, were the two-masted schooners named Nikolai and Mikhail, the former was a warship, the latter was a merchant vessel meant to serve the establishment of the fisheries on the great lake. In 1848, these two surveyed the northern part of the sea. In the same year, a warship, the Constantine, was assembled. Commanded by Lt. Alexey Butakov, the Constantine completed the survey of the entire Aral Sea over the two years
16.
Wildfire
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A wildfire or wildland fire is a fire in an area of combustible vegetation that occurs in the countryside or rural area. Fossil charcoal indicates that wildfires began soon after the appearance of terrestrial plants 420 million years ago, wildfire’s occurrence throughout the history of terrestrial life invites conjecture that fire must have had pronounced evolutionary effects on most ecosystems flora and fauna. Earth is an intrinsically flammable planet owing to its cover of vegetation, seasonally dry climates, atmospheric oxygen, widespread lightning. Wildfires can be characterised in terms of the cause of ignition, their properties, the combustible material present. Wildfires can cause damage to property and human life, but they have beneficial effects on native vegetation, animals. Many plant species depend on the effects of fire for growth, however, wildfire in ecosystems where wildfire is uncommon or where non-native vegetation has encroached may have negative ecological effects. Wildfire behaviour and severity result from the combination of such as available fuels, physical setting. Strategies of wildfire prevention, detection and suppression have varied over the years, one common and inexpensive technique is controlled burning, permitting or even igniting smaller fires to minimise the amount of flammable material available for a potential wildfire. Vegetation may be burned periodically to maintain species diversity and frequent burning of surface fuels limits fuel accumulation. Wildland fire use is the cheapest and most ecologically appropriate policy for many forests, fuels may also be removed by logging, but fuels treatments and thinning have no effect on severe fire behaviour. Wildfires can also be started in communities experiencing shifting cultivation, where land is cleared quickly and farmed until the soil loses fertility, forested areas cleared by logging encourage the dominance of flammable grasses, and abandoned logging roads overgrown by vegetation may act as fire corridors. The most common cause of wildfires throughout the world. In Canada and northwest China, for example, lightning operates as the source of ignition. In other parts of the world, human involvement is a major contributor, in China and in the Mediterranean Basin, human carelessness is a major cause of wildfires. In the United States and Australia, the source of wildfires can be traced both to lightning strikes and to human activities. Coal seam fires burn in the thousands around the world, such as those in Burning Mountain, New South Wales, Centralia, Pennsylvania and they can also flare up unexpectedly and ignite nearby flammable material. The spread of wildfires based on the flammable material present, its vertical arrangement and moisture content. Fuel arrangement and density is governed in part by topography, as land shape determines factors such as available sunlight, overall, fire types can be generally characterized by their fuels as follows, Ground fires are fed by subterranean roots, duff and other buried organic matter
17.
United States Forest Service
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The United States Forest Service is an agency of the U. S. Department of Agriculture that administers the nations 154 national forests and 20 national grasslands, which encompass 193 million acres. Major divisions of the include the National Forest System, State and Private Forestry, Business Operations. Managing approximately 25% of federal lands, it is the major national land agency that is outside the U. S. Department of the Interior. The concept of the National Forests was born from Theodore Roosevelt’s conservation group, Boone and Crockett Club, in 1876, Congress created the office of Special Agent in the Department of Agriculture to assess the quality and conditions of forests in the United States. Hough was appointed the head of the office, in 1881, the office was expanded into the newly formed Division of Forestry. The Forest Reserve Act of 1891 authorized withdrawing land from the domain as forest reserves. In 1901, the Division of Forestry was renamed the Bureau of Forestry, gifford Pinchot was the first United States Chief Forester in the Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. As of 2009, the Forest Service has a budget authority of $5.5 billion. The Forest Service employs 34,250 employees in 750 locations, including 10,050 firefighters,737 law enforcement personnel, and 500 scientists. The mission of the Forest Service is To sustain the health, diversity and its motto is Caring for the land and serving people. As the lead agency in natural resource conservation, the US Forest Service provides leadership in the protection, management, and use of the nations forest, rangeland. The agencys ecosystem approach to management integrates ecological, economic, and social factors to maintain and enhance the quality of the environment to meet current, the everyday work of the Forest Service balances resource extraction, resource protection, and providing recreation.5 billion trees per year. Further, the Forest Service fought fires on 2,996,000 acres of land in 2007, the Forest Service organization includes ranger districts, national forests, regions, research stations and research work units and the Northeastern Area Office for State and Private Forestry. Each level has responsibility for a variety of functions, the Chief of the Forest Service is a career federal employee who oversees the entire agency. The Chief reports to the Under Secretary for Natural Resources and Environment in the U. S. Department of Agriculture, there are five deputy chiefs for the following areas, National Forest System, State and Private Forestry, Research and Development, Business Operations, and Finance. The Forest Service Research and Development deputy area includes five stations, the Forest Products Laboratory. Station directors, like regional foresters, report to the Chief, Research stations include Northern, Pacific Northwest, Pacific Southwest, Rocky Mountain, and Southern. There are 92 research work units located at 67 sites throughout the United States, there are 80 Experimental Forests and Ranges that have been established progressively since 1908, many sites are more than 50 years old
18.
Electromagnetic radiation
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In physics, electromagnetic radiation refers to the waves of the electromagnetic field, propagating through space carrying electromagnetic radiant energy. It includes radio waves, microwaves, infrared, light, ultraviolet, X-, classically, electromagnetic radiation consists of electromagnetic waves, which are synchronized oscillations of electric and magnetic fields that propagate at the speed of light through a vacuum. The oscillations of the two fields are perpendicular to other and perpendicular to the direction of energy and wave propagation. The wavefront of electromagnetic waves emitted from a point source is a sphere, the position of an electromagnetic wave within the electromagnetic spectrum can be characterized by either its frequency of oscillation or its wavelength. Electromagnetic waves are produced whenever charged particles are accelerated, and these waves can interact with other charged particles. EM waves carry energy, momentum and angular momentum away from their source particle, quanta of EM waves are called photons, whose rest mass is zero, but whose energy, or equivalent total mass, is not zero so they are still affected by gravity. Thus, EMR is sometimes referred to as the far field, in this language, the near field refers to EM fields near the charges and current that directly produced them, specifically, electromagnetic induction and electrostatic induction phenomena. In the quantum theory of electromagnetism, EMR consists of photons, quantum effects provide additional sources of EMR, such as the transition of electrons to lower energy levels in an atom and black-body radiation. The energy of a photon is quantized and is greater for photons of higher frequency. This relationship is given by Plancks equation E = hν, where E is the energy per photon, ν is the frequency of the photon, a single gamma ray photon, for example, might carry ~100,000 times the energy of a single photon of visible light. The effects of EMR upon chemical compounds and biological organisms depend both upon the power and its frequency. EMR of visible or lower frequencies is called non-ionizing radiation, because its photons do not individually have enough energy to ionize atoms or molecules, the effects of these radiations on chemical systems and living tissue are caused primarily by heating effects from the combined energy transfer of many photons. In contrast, high ultraviolet, X-rays and gamma rays are called ionizing radiation since individual photons of high frequency have enough energy to ionize molecules or break chemical bonds. These radiations have the ability to cause chemical reactions and damage living cells beyond that resulting from simple heating, Maxwell derived a wave form of the electric and magnetic equations, thus uncovering the wave-like nature of electric and magnetic fields and their symmetry. Because the speed of EM waves predicted by the wave equation coincided with the speed of light. Maxwell’s equations were confirmed by Heinrich Hertz through experiments with radio waves, according to Maxwells equations, a spatially varying electric field is always associated with a magnetic field that changes over time. Likewise, a varying magnetic field is associated with specific changes over time in the electric field. In an electromagnetic wave, the changes in the field are always accompanied by a wave in the magnetic field in one direction
19.
Phenology
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Phenology is the study of periodic plant and animal life cycle events and how these are influenced by seasonal and interannual variations in climate, as well as habitat factors. In the scientific literature on ecology, the term is used generally to indicate the time frame for any seasonal biological phenomena. For example, viticultural records of grape harvests in Europe have been used to reconstruct a record of growing season temperatures going back more than 500 years. In addition to providing a longer baseline than instrumental measurements. Observations of phenological events have provided indications of the progress of the calendar since ancient agricultural times. If ash before oak, youre in for a soak, theoretically, though, these are not mutually exclusive, as one forecasts immediate conditions and one forecasts future conditions. This program, originally started by Wells W. Cooke, involved over 3,000 observers including many notable naturalists of the time, the program ran for 90 years and came to a close in 1970 when other programs starting up at PWRC took precedence. The data, reported in Whites Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne are reported as the earliest and latest dates for each event over 25 years, so annual changes cannot therefore be determined. In Japan and China the time of blossoming of cherry and peach trees is associated with ancient festivals, such historical records may, in principle, be capable of providing estimates of climate at dates before instrumental records became available.75. Robert Marsham is the father of modern phenological recording. Marsham was a landowner who kept systematic records of Indications of spring on his estate at Stratton Strawless, Norfolk. These were in the form of dates of the first occurrence of such as flowering, bud burst. The data show significant variation in dates which correspond with warm. Between 1850 and 1950 a long-term trend of gradual climate warming is observable, after 1960 the rate of warming accelerated, and this is mirrored by increasing earliness of oak leafing, recorded in the data collected by Jean Combes in Surrey. Over the past 250 years, the first leafing date of oak appears to have advanced by about 8 days, up to 600 observers submitted returns in some years, with numbers averaging a few hundred. During this period 11 main plant phenophases were recorded over the 58 years from 1891–1948. The returns were summarised each year in the Quarterly Journal of the RMS as The Phenological Reports, in all 25 species, the timings of all phenological events are significantly related to temperature, indicating that phenological events are likely to get earlier as climate warms. The Phenological Reports ended suddenly in 1948 after 58 years, and Britain was without a recording scheme for almost 50 years
20.
Bidirectional reflectance distribution function
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The bidirectional reflectance distribution function is a function of four real variables that defines how light is reflected at an opaque surface. It is employed both in the optics of real-world light, in computer algorithms, and in computer vision algorithms. Each direction ω is itself parameterized by azimuth angle ϕ and zenith angle θ, the BRDF has units sr−1, with steradians being a unit of solid angle. The BRDF was first defined by Fred Nicodemus around 1965, the index i indicates incident light, whereas the index r indicates reflected light. The Spatially Varying Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function is a 6-dimensional function, f r, the functions defined by the BTF at each point on the surface are thus called Apparent BRDFs. In all these cases, the dependence on the wavelength of light has been ignored and binned into RGB channels, in reality, the BRDF is wavelength dependent, and to account for effects such as iridescence or luminescence the dependence on wavelength must be made explicit, f r. BRDF has also used for modeling light trapping in solar cells or low concentration solar photovoltaic systems. In the context of satellite remote sensing, NASA uses a BRDF model to characterise surface anisotropy, for a given land area, the BRDF is established based on selected multiangular observations of surface reflectance. While single observations depend on view geometry and solar angle, the MODIS BRDF/Albedo product describes intrinsic surface properties in several spectral bands, the BRDF/Albedo product can be used to model surface albedo depending on atmospheric scattering. W. Matusik et al. found that interpolating between measured samples produced realistic results and was easy to understand, lambertian model, representing perfectly diffuse surfaces by a constant BRDF. Phong reflectance model, a phenomenological model akin to plastic-like specularity, blinn–Phong model, resembling Phong, but allowing for certain quantities to be interpolated, reducing computational overhead. Torrance–Sparrow model, a model representing surfaces as distributions of perfectly specular microfacets. Cook–Torrance model, a specular-microfacet model accounting for wavelength and thus color shifting, ward model, a specular-microfacet model with an elliptical-Gaussian distribution function dependent on surface tangent orientation. Oren–Nayar model, a directed-diffuse microfacet model, with perfectly diffuse microfacets, ashikhmin-Shirley model, allowing for anisotropic reflectance, along with a diffuse substrate under a specular surface. HTSG, a physically based model. Fitted Lafortune model, a generalization of Phong with multiple specular lobes, lebedev model for analytical-grid BRDF approximation. Traditionally, BRDF measurements were taken for one specific lighting and viewing direction at a time using gonioreflectometers, unfortunately, using such a device to densely measure the BRDF is very time consuming. One of the first improvements on techniques used a half-silvered mirror
21.
Albedo
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Albedo is a measure for reflectance or optical brightness. It is dimensionless and measured on a scale from zero to one, surface albedo is defined as the ratio of radiation reflected to the radiation incident on a surface. The proportion reflected is not only determined by properties of the surface itself and these factors vary with atmospheric composition, geographic location and time. While bi-hemispherical reflectance is calculated for an angle of incidence. The temporal resolution may range from seconds to daily, seasonal or annual averages, unless given for a specific wavelength, albedo refers to the entire spectrum of solar radiation. Due to measurement constraints, it is given for the spectrum in which most solar energy reaches the surface. This spectrum includes visible light, which explains why surfaces with a low albedo appear dark, albedo is an important concept in climatology, astronomy, and environmental management. The term albedo was introduced into optics by Johann Heinrich Lambert in his 1760 work Photometria, any albedo in visible light falls within a range of about 0.9 for fresh snow to about 0.04 for charcoal, one of the darkest substances. Deeply shadowed cavities can achieve an effective albedo approaching the zero of a black body, when seen from a distance, the ocean surface has a low albedo, as do most forests, whereas desert areas have some of the highest albedos among landforms. Most land areas are in a range of 0.1 to 0.4. The average albedo of Earth is about 0.3 and this is far higher than for the ocean primarily because of the contribution of clouds. Earths surface albedo is regularly estimated via Earth observation satellite sensors such as NASAs MODIS instruments on board the Terra, thereby, the BRDF allows to translate observations of reflectance into albedo. Earths average surface temperature due to its albedo and the effect is currently about 15 °C. If Earth were frozen entirely, the temperature of the planet would drop below −40 °C. If only the land masses became covered by glaciers, the mean temperature of the planet would drop to about 0 °C. In contrast, if the entire Earth was covered by water — a so-called aquaplanet — the average temperature on the planet would rise to almost 27 °C, hence, the actual albedo α can then be given as, α = α ¯ + D α ¯ ¯. Directional-hemispherical reflectance is sometimes referred to as black-sky albedo and bi-hemispherical reflectance as white-sky albedo and these terms are important because they allow the albedo to be calculated for any given illumination conditions from a knowledge of the intrinsic properties of the surface. The albedos of planets, satellites and asteroids can be used to infer much about their properties, the study of albedos, their dependence on wavelength, lighting angle, and variation in time comprises a major part of the astronomical field of photometry
22.
World Wide Web
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The World Wide Web is an information space where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators, interlinked by hypertext links, and can be accessed via the Internet. English scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 and he wrote the first web browser computer program in 1990 while employed at CERN in Switzerland. The Web browser was released outside of CERN in 1991, first to research institutions starting in January 1991. The World Wide Web has been central to the development of the Information Age and is the primary tool billions of people use to interact on the Internet, Web pages are primarily text documents formatted and annotated with Hypertext Markup Language. In addition to formatted text, web pages may contain images, video, audio, embedded hyperlinks permit users to navigate between web pages. Multiple web pages with a theme, a common domain name. Website content can largely be provided by the publisher, or interactive where users contribute content or the content depends upon the user or their actions, websites may be mostly informative, primarily for entertainment, or largely for commercial, governmental, or non-governmental organisational purposes. In the 2006 Great British Design Quest organised by the BBC and the Design Museum, Tim Berners-Lees vision of a global hyperlinked information system became a possibility by the second half of the 1980s. By 1985, the global Internet began to proliferate in Europe, in 1988 the first direct IP connection between Europe and North America was made and Berners-Lee began to openly discuss the possibility of a web-like system at CERN. Such a system, he explained, could be referred to using one of the meanings of the word hypertext. At this point HTML and HTTP had already been in development for two months and the first Web server was about a month from completing its first successful test. While the read-only goal was met, accessible authorship of web content took longer to mature, with the concept, WebDAV, blogs, Web 2.0. The proposal was modelled after the SGML reader Dynatext by Electronic Book Technology, a NeXT Computer was used by Berners-Lee as the worlds first web server and also to write the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, in 1990. By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the necessary for a working Web, the first web browser. The first web site, which described the project itself, was published on 20 December 1990, jones stored it on a magneto-optical drive and on his NeXT computer. On 6 August 1991, Berners-Lee published a summary of the World Wide Web project on the newsgroup alt. hypertext. This date is confused with the public availability of the first web servers. The first server outside Europe was installed at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Palo Alto, California, accounts differ substantially as to the date of this event
23.
FTP
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The File Transfer Protocol is a standard network protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client using the Client–server model on a computer network. FTP is built on a model architecture and uses separate control. FTP users may authenticate themselves with a clear-text sign-in protocol, normally in the form of a username and password, for secure transmission that protects the username and password, and encrypts the content, FTP is often secured with SSL/TLS. SSH File Transfer Protocol is sometimes used instead, but is technologically different. The original specification for the File Transfer Protocol was written by Abhay Bhushan, until 1980, FTP ran on NCP, the predecessor of TCP/IP. The protocol was replaced by a TCP/IP version, RFC765 and RFC959. FTP may run in active or passive mode, which determines how the connection is established. In both cases, the client creates a TCP control connection from a random, usually an unprivileged, in active mode, the client starts listening for incoming data connections from the server on port M. It sends the FTP command PORT M to inform the server on which port it is listening, the server then initiates a data channel to the client from its port 20, the FTP server data port. In situations where the client is behind a firewall and unable to accept incoming TCP connections, both modes were updated in September 1998 to support IPv6. Further changes were introduced to the mode at that time. The server responds over the connection with three-digit status codes in ASCII with an optional text message. For example,200 means that the last command was successful, the numbers represent the code for the response and the optional text represents a human-readable explanation or request. An ongoing transfer of data over the data connection can be aborted using an interrupt message sent over the control connection. While transferring data over the network, four data representations can be used, ASCII mode, Data is converted, if needed, from the sending hosts character representation to 8-bit ASCII before transmission, and to the receiving hosts character representation. As a consequence, this mode is inappropriate for files that contain other than plain text. Image mode, The sending machine sends each file byte by byte, EBCDIC mode, Used for plain text between hosts using the EBCDIC character set. Local mode, Allows two computers with identical setups to send data in a format without the need to convert it to ASCII
24.
File Transfer Protocol
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The File Transfer Protocol is a standard network protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client using the Client–server model on a computer network. FTP is built on a model architecture and uses separate control. FTP users may authenticate themselves with a clear-text sign-in protocol, normally in the form of a username and password, for secure transmission that protects the username and password, and encrypts the content, FTP is often secured with SSL/TLS. SSH File Transfer Protocol is sometimes used instead, but is technologically different. The original specification for the File Transfer Protocol was written by Abhay Bhushan, until 1980, FTP ran on NCP, the predecessor of TCP/IP. The protocol was replaced by a TCP/IP version, RFC765 and RFC959. FTP may run in active or passive mode, which determines how the connection is established. In both cases, the client creates a TCP control connection from a random, usually an unprivileged, in active mode, the client starts listening for incoming data connections from the server on port M. It sends the FTP command PORT M to inform the server on which port it is listening, the server then initiates a data channel to the client from its port 20, the FTP server data port. In situations where the client is behind a firewall and unable to accept incoming TCP connections, both modes were updated in September 1998 to support IPv6. Further changes were introduced to the mode at that time. The server responds over the connection with three-digit status codes in ASCII with an optional text message. For example,200 means that the last command was successful, the numbers represent the code for the response and the optional text represents a human-readable explanation or request. An ongoing transfer of data over the data connection can be aborted using an interrupt message sent over the control connection. While transferring data over the network, four data representations can be used, ASCII mode, Data is converted, if needed, from the sending hosts character representation to 8-bit ASCII before transmission, and to the receiving hosts character representation. As a consequence, this mode is inappropriate for files that contain other than plain text. Image mode, The sending machine sends each file byte by byte, EBCDIC mode, Used for plain text between hosts using the EBCDIC character set. Local mode, Allows two computers with identical setups to send data in a format without the need to convert it to ASCII
25.
Hierarchical Data Format
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Hierarchical Data Format is a set of file formats designed to store and organize large amounts of data. In keeping with this goal, the HDF libraries and associated tools are available under a liberal, HDF is supported by many commercial and non-commercial software platforms, including Java, MATLAB, Scilab, Octave, Mathematica, IDL, Python, R, and Julia. The freely available HDF distribution consists of the library, command-line utilities, test suite source, Java interface, the current version, HDF5, differs significantly in design and API from the major legacy version HDF4. The quest for a scientific data format, originally dubbed AEHOO began in 1987 by the Graphics Foundations Task Force at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. NSF grants received in 1990 and 1992 were important to the project, around this time NASA investigated 15 different file formats for use in the Earth Observing System project. After a two-year review process, HDF was selected as the standard data, HDF4 is the older version of the format, although still actively supported by The HDF Group. It supports a proliferation of different data models, including arrays, raster images. Each defines a specific data type and provides an API for reading, writing. New data models can be added by the HDF developers or users, HDF is self-describing, allowing an application to interpret the structure and contents of a file with no outside information. One HDF file can hold a mix of related objects which can be accessed as a group or as individual objects, users can create their own grouping structures called vgroups. The HDF4 format has many limitations and it lacks a clear object model, which makes continued support and improvement difficult. Supporting many different interface styles leads to a complex API, support for metadata depends on which interface is in use, SD objects support arbitrary named attributes, while other types only support predefined metadata. Perhaps most importantly, the use of 32-bit signed integers for addressing limits HDF4 files to a maximum of 2 GB, the HDF5 format is designed to address some of the limitations of the HDF4 library, and to address current and anticipated requirements of modern systems and applications. In 2002 it won an R&D100 Award, in fact, resources in an HDF5 file are even accessed using the POSIX-like syntax /path/to/resource. Metadata is stored in the form of user-defined, named attributes attached to groups, more complex storage APIs representing images and tables can then be built up using datasets, groups and attributes. In addition to advances in the file format, HDF5 includes an improved type system. The API is also object-oriented with respect to datasets, groups, attributes, types, dataspaces, the latest version of NetCDF, version 4, is based on HDF5. Because it uses B-trees to index table objects, HDF5 works well for time series such as stock price series, network monitoring data
26.
Imaging spectroscopy
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In Imaging spectroscopy each pixel of an image acquires many bands of light intensity data from the spectrum, instead of just the three bands of the RGB color model. More precisely, it is the acquisition of spatially coregistered images in many spectrally contiguous bands. Some spectral images contain only a few planes of a spectral data cube. The multispectral images collected by the Opportunity rover, in contrast, have only four wavelength bands, to be scientifically useful, such measurement should be done using an internationally recognized system of units. One application is spectral geophysical imaging, which allows quantitative and qualitative characterization of the surface and of the atmosphere, the Moon Mineralogy Mapper on Chandrayaan-1 was a geophysical imaging spectrometer. In 1704, Sir Isaac Newton demonstrated that light could be split up into component colours. The subsequent history of spectroscopy led to measurements and provided the empirical foundations for atomic. Significant achievements in imaging spectroscopy are attributed to airborne instruments, particularly arising in the early 1980s and 1990s, however, it was not until 1999 that the first imaging spectrometer was launched in space. Terminology and definitions evolve over time, the term hyperspectral imaging is sometimes used interchangeably with imaging spectroscopy. Due to its use in military related applications, the civil world has established a slight preference for using the term imaging spectroscopy. Hyperspectral data is used to determine what materials are present in a scene. Materials of interest could include roadways, vegetation, and specific targets, trivially, each pixel of a hyperspectral image could be compared to a material database to determine the type of material making up the pixel. However, many hyperspectral imaging platforms have low resolution causing each pixel to be a mixture of several materials, the process of unmixing one of these mixed pixels is called hyperspectral image unmixing or simply hyperspectral unmixing. A solution to hyperspectral unmixing is to reverse the mixing process, generally, two models of mixing are assumed, linear and nonlinear. Linear mixing models the ground as being flat and incident sunlight on the causes the materials to radiate some amount of the incident energy back to the sensor. Each pixel then, is modeled as a sum of all the radiated energy curves of materials making up the pixel. Therefore, each contributes to the sensors observation in a positive linear fashion. Additionally, a conservation of energy constraint is often observed thereby forcing the weights of the mixture to sum to one in addition to being positive
27.
NASA World Wind
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World Wind is an open-source virtual globe first developed by NASA in 2003 for use on personal computers and then further developed in concert with the open source community since 2004. As of 2017 a web based version of World Wind is available online, the original version relied on. NET Framework, which ran only on Microsoft Windows. The SDK includes a suite of basic demos, available at goworldwind. org, the World Wind Java version was awarded NASA Software of the Year in November 2009. The program overlays NASA and USGS satellite imagery, aerial photography, topographic maps, Keyhole Markup Language, though widely available since 2003, World Wind was released with the NASA Open Source Agreement license in 2004. The latest Java-based version, was released in December 2016, as of 2015 a web based version of World Wind is under development and available online. An Android version is also available, the previous. NET-based version was an application with an extensive suite of plugins. Apart from the Earth there are worlds, Moon, Mars, Venus, Jupiter. Users could interact with the planet by rotating it, tilting the view. Five million place names, political boundaries, latitude/longitude lines, World Wind. NET provided the ability to browse maps and geospatial data on the internet using the OGCs WMS servers, import ESRI shapefiles and kml/kmz files. This is an example of how World Wind allows anyone to deliver their data, other features of World Wind. NET included support for. X models and advanced visual effects such as atmospheric scattering or sun shading. The resolution inside the US is high enough to discern individual buildings, houses, cars. The resolution outside the US is at least 15 meters per pixel, Microsoft has allowed World Wind to incorporate Virtual Earth high resolution data for non-commercial use. World Wind uses digital elevation model data collected by NASAs Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, National Elevation Dataset and this means one can view topographic features such as the Grand Canyon or Mount Everest in three dimensions. In addition, WW has bathymetry data which allows users to see ocean features, such as trenches and ridges, in 3D. Many people using the applications are adding their own data and are making them available through various sources, such as the World Wind Central or blogs mentioned in the link section below. All images and movies created with World Wind using Blue Marble, Landsat, or USGS public domain data can be modified, re-distributed. World Wind can be expanded by using one of many add-ons - small extensions that add new functionality to the program, plug-in developers can add features to World Wind without changing the programs source code. The original recipe for World Wind was restricted to Windows, relying on the. NET libraries, a new SDK version has been developed in Java with JOGL referred to as World Wind Java
28.
Wayback Machine
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The Internet Archive launched the Wayback Machine in October 2001. It was set up by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat, and is maintained with content from Alexa Internet, the service enables users to see archived versions of web pages across time, which the archive calls a three dimensional index. Since 1996, the Wayback Machine has been archiving cached pages of websites onto its large cluster of Linux nodes and it revisits sites every few weeks or months and archives a new version. Sites can also be captured on the fly by visitors who enter the sites URL into a search box, the intent is to capture and archive content that otherwise would be lost whenever a site is changed or closed down. The overall vision of the machines creators is to archive the entire Internet, the name Wayback Machine was chosen as a reference to the WABAC machine, a time-traveling device used by the characters Mr. Peabody and Sherman in The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, an animated cartoon. These crawlers also respect the robots exclusion standard for websites whose owners opt for them not to appear in search results or be cached, to overcome inconsistencies in partially cached websites, Archive-It. Information had been kept on digital tape for five years, with Kahle occasionally allowing researchers, when the archive reached its fifth anniversary, it was unveiled and opened to the public in a ceremony at the University of California, Berkeley. Snapshots usually become more than six months after they are archived or, in some cases, even later. The frequency of snapshots is variable, so not all tracked website updates are recorded, Sometimes there are intervals of several weeks or years between snapshots. After August 2008 sites had to be listed on the Open Directory in order to be included. As of 2009, the Wayback Machine contained approximately three petabytes of data and was growing at a rate of 100 terabytes each month, the growth rate reported in 2003 was 12 terabytes/month, the data is stored on PetaBox rack systems manufactured by Capricorn Technologies. In 2009, the Internet Archive migrated its customized storage architecture to Sun Open Storage, in 2011 a new, improved version of the Wayback Machine, with an updated interface and fresher index of archived content, was made available for public testing. The index driving the classic Wayback Machine only has a bit of material past 2008. In January 2013, the company announced a ground-breaking milestone of 240 billion URLs, in October 2013, the company announced the Save a Page feature which allows any Internet user to archive the contents of a URL. This became a threat of abuse by the service for hosting malicious binaries, as of December 2014, the Wayback Machine contained almost nine petabytes of data and was growing at a rate of about 20 terabytes each week. Between October 2013 and March 2015 the websites global Alexa rank changed from 162 to 208, in a 2009 case, Netbula, LLC v. Chordiant Software Inc. defendant Chordiant filed a motion to compel Netbula to disable the robots. Netbula objected to the motion on the ground that defendants were asking to alter Netbulas website, in an October 2004 case, Telewizja Polska USA, Inc. v. Echostar Satellite, No.02 C3293,65 Fed. 673, a litigant attempted to use the Wayback Machine archives as a source of admissible evidence, Telewizja Polska is the provider of TVP Polonia and EchoStar operates the Dish Network
29.
Python (programming language)
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Python is a widely used high-level programming language for general-purpose programming, created by Guido van Rossum and first released in 1991. The language provides constructs intended to enable writing clear programs on both a small and large scale and it has a large and comprehensive standard library. Python interpreters are available for operating systems, allowing Python code to run on a wide variety of systems. CPython, the implementation of Python, is open source software and has a community-based development model. CPython is managed by the non-profit Python Software Foundation, about the origin of Python, Van Rossum wrote in 1996, Over six years ago, in December 1989, I was looking for a hobby programming project that would keep me occupied during the week around Christmas. Would be closed, but I had a computer. I decided to write an interpreter for the new scripting language I had been thinking about lately, I chose Python as a working title for the project, being in a slightly irreverent mood. Python 2.0 was released on 16 October 2000 and had major new features, including a cycle-detecting garbage collector. With this release the development process was changed and became more transparent, Python 3.0, a major, backwards-incompatible release, was released on 3 December 2008 after a long period of testing. Many of its features have been backported to the backwards-compatible Python 2.6. x and 2.7. x version series. The End Of Life date for Python 2.7 was initially set at 2015, many other paradigms are supported via extensions, including design by contract and logic programming. Python uses dynamic typing and a mix of reference counting and a garbage collector for memory management. An important feature of Python is dynamic name resolution, which binds method, the design of Python offers some support for functional programming in the Lisp tradition. The language has map, reduce and filter functions, list comprehensions, dictionaries, and sets, the standard library has two modules that implement functional tools borrowed from Haskell and Standard ML. Python can also be embedded in existing applications that need a programmable interface, while offering choice in coding methodology, the Python philosophy rejects exuberant syntax, such as in Perl, in favor of a sparser, less-cluttered grammar. As Alex Martelli put it, To describe something as clever is not considered a compliment in the Python culture. Pythons philosophy rejects the Perl there is more one way to do it approach to language design in favor of there should be one—and preferably only one—obvious way to do it. Pythons developers strive to avoid premature optimization, and moreover, reject patches to non-critical parts of CPython that would offer an increase in speed at the cost of clarity
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Remote sensing
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Remote sensing is the acquisition of information about an object or phenomenon without making physical contact with the object and thus in contrast to on-site observation. It may be split into active remote sensing and passive remote sensing, passive sensors gather radiation that is emitted or reflected by the object or surrounding areas. Reflected sunlight is the most common source of radiation measured by passive sensors, examples of passive remote sensors include film photography, infrared, charge-coupled devices, and radiometers. Active collection, on the hand, emits energy in order to scan objects and areas whereupon a sensor then detects. RADAR and LiDAR are examples of remote sensing where the time delay between emission and return is measured, establishing the location, speed and direction of an object. Remote sensing makes it possible to data of dangerous or inaccessible areas. Remote sensing applications include monitoring deforestation in areas such as the Amazon Basin, glacial features in Arctic and Antarctic regions, military collection during the Cold War made use of stand-off collection of data about dangerous border areas. Remote sensing also replaces costly and slow data collection on the ground, the basis for multispectral collection and analysis is that of examined areas or objects that reflect or emit radiation that stand out from surrounding areas. For a summary of major remote sensing satellite systems see the overview table, conventional radar is mostly associated with aerial traffic control, early warning, and certain large scale meteorological data. Other types of active collection includes plasmas in the ionosphere, interferometric synthetic aperture radar is used to produce precise digital elevation models of large scale terrain. Laser and radar altimeters on satellites have provided a range of data. By measuring the bulges of water caused by gravity, they map features on the seafloor to a resolution of a mile or so, by measuring the height and wavelength of ocean waves, the altimeters measure wind speeds and direction, and surface ocean currents and directions. Ultrasound and radar tide gauges measure sea level, tides and wave direction in coastal, light detection and ranging is well known in examples of weapon ranging, laser illuminated homing of projectiles. Vegetation remote sensing is an application of LIDAR. Radiometers and photometers are the most common instrument in use, collecting reflected and emitted radiation in a range of frequencies. The most common are visible and infrared sensors, followed by microwave, gamma ray and rarely and they may also be used to detect the emission spectra of various chemicals, providing data on chemical concentrations in the atmosphere. Simultaneous multi-spectral platforms such as Landsat have been in use since the 1970s and these thematic mappers take images in multiple wavelengths of electro-magnetic radiation and are usually found on Earth observation satellites, including the Landsat program or the IKONOS satellite. Landsat images are used by agencies such as KYDOW to indicate water quality parameters including Secchi depth, chlorophyll a density
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Earth observation satellite
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Most Earth observation satellites carry instruments that should be operated at a relatively low altitude. Altitudes below 500-600 kilometers are in general avoided, though, because of the significant air-drag at such low altitudes making frequent orbit reboost maneuvres necessary. The Earth observation satellites ERS-1, ERS-2 and Envisat of European Space Agency as well as the MetOp spacecraft of EUMETSAT are all operated at altitudes of about 800 km. The Proba-1, Proba-2 and SMOS spacecraft of European Space Agency are observing the Earth from an altitude of about 700 km, the Earth observation satellites of UAE, DubaiSat-1 & DubaiSat-2 are also placed in Low Earth Orbits orbits and providing satellite imagery of various parts of the Earth. To get global coverage with a low orbit it must be a polar orbit or nearly so, spacecraft carrying instruments for which an altitude of 36000 km is suitable sometimes use a geostationary orbit. Such an orbit allows uninterrupted coverage of more than 1/3 of the Earth, three geostationary spacecraft at longitudes separated with 120 deg can cover the whole Earth except the extreme polar regions. This type of orbit is used for meteorological satellites. A weather satellite is a type of satellite that is used to monitor the weather. These meteorological satellites, however, see more than clouds and cloud systems, weather satellite images helped in monitoring the volcanic ash cloud from Mount St. Helens and activity from other volcanoes such as Mount Etna. By monitoring vegetation changes over time, droughts can be monitored by comparing the current vegetation state to its long term average, anthropogenic emissions can be monitored by evaluating data of tropospheric NO2 and SO2. These types of satellites are almost always in Sun synchronous and frozen orbits, the Sun synchronous orbit is in general sufficiently close to polar to get the desired global coverage while the relatively constant geometry to the Sun mostly is an advantage for the instruments. The frozen orbit is selected as this is the closest to an orbit that is possible in the gravitational field of the Earth. Terrain can be mapped from space with the use of satellites, such as Radarsat-1 and TerraSAR-X. campevans. org/_CE/html/tiros1-2. html
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Geographic information system
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A geographic information system is a system designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present spatial or geographic data. What goes beyond a GIS is a spatial data infrastructure, a concept that has no such restrictive boundaries, in general, the term describes any information system that integrates, stores, edits, analyzes, shares, and displays geographic information. GIS applications are tools that allow users to create interactive queries, analyze spatial information, edit data in maps, Geographic information science is the science underlying geographic concepts, applications, and systems. GIS is a term that can refer to a number of different technologies, processes. It is attached to operations and has many applications related to engineering, planning, management, transport/logistics, insurance, telecommunications. For that reason, GIS and location intelligence applications can be the foundation for many location-enabled services that rely on analysis, GIS can relate unrelated information by using location as the key index variable. Locations or extents in the Earth space–time may be recorded as dates/times of occurrence, and x, y, and z coordinates representing, longitude, latitude, all Earth-based spatial–temporal location and extent references should be relatable to one another and ultimately to a real physical location or extent. This key characteristic of GIS has begun to open new avenues of scientific inquiry, the first known use of the term geographic information system was by Roger Tomlinson in the year 1968 in his paper A Geographic Information System for Regional Planning. Tomlinson is also acknowledged as the father of GIS, previously, one of the first applications of spatial analysis in epidemiology is the 1832 Rapport sur la marche et les effets du choléra dans Paris et le département de la Seine. The French geographer Charles Picquet represented the 48 districts of the city of Paris by halftone color gradient according to the number of deaths by cholera per 1,000 inhabitants and this was one of the earliest successful uses of a geographic methodology in epidemiology. The early 20th century saw the development of photozincography, which allowed maps to be split into layers, for one layer for vegetation. This work was drawn on glass plates but later plastic film was introduced, with the advantages of being lighter, using less storage space and being less brittle. When all the layers were finished, they were combined into one using a large process camera. Once color printing came in, the idea was also used for creating separate printing plates for each color. Computer hardware development spurred by nuclear weapon research led to general-purpose computer mapping applications by the early 1960s, the year 1960 saw the development of the worlds first true operational GIS in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada by the federal Department of Forestry and Rural Development. A rating classification factor was added to permit analysis. CGIS was an improvement over computer mapping applications as it provided capabilities for overlay, measurement and it supported a national coordinate system that spanned the continent, coded lines as arcs having a true embedded topology and it stored the attribute and locational information in separate files. As a result of this, Tomlinson has become known as the father of GIS, CGIS lasted into the 1990s and built a large digital land resource database in Canada
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Weather satellite
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The weather satellite is a type of satellite that is primarily used to monitor the weather and climate of the Earth. Satellites can be polar orbiting, covering the entire Earth asynchronously, or geostationary, Meteorological satellites see more than clouds and cloud systems. City lights, fires, effects of pollution, auroras, sand and dust storms, snow cover, ice mapping, boundaries of currents, energy flows. Other types of information are collected using weather satellites. Weather satellite images helped in monitoring the volcanic ash cloud from Mount St. Helens, smoke from fires in the western United States such as Colorado and Utah have also been monitored. Other environmental satellites can detect changes in the Earths vegetation, sea state, ocean color, El Niño and its effects on weather are monitored daily from satellite images. The Antarctic ozone hole is mapped from weather satellite data, collectively, weather satellites flown by the U. S. Europe, India, China, Russia, and Japan provide nearly continuous observations for a global weather watch. As early as 1946, the idea of cameras in orbit to observe the weather was being developed and this was due to sparse data observation coverage and the expense of using cloud cameras on rockets. By 1958, the prototypes for TIROS and Vanguard were created. The first weather satellite, Vanguard 2, was launched on February 17,1959 and it was designed to measure cloud cover and resistance, but a poor axis of rotation and its elliptical orbit kept it from collecting a notable amount of useful data. The Explorer VI and VII satellites also contained weather-related experiments, the first weather satellite to be considered a success was TIROS-1, launched by NASA on April 1,1960. TIROS operated for 78 days and proved to be more successful than Vanguard 2. TIROS paved the way for the Nimbus program, whose technology and findings are the heritage of most of the Earth-observing satellites NASA, the ESSA and NOAA polar orbiting satellites followed suit from the late 1960s onward. Geostationary satellites followed, beginning with the ATS and SMS series in the late 1960s and early 1970s, observation is typically made via different channels of the electromagnetic spectrum, in particular, the visible and infrared portions. Some of these channels include Visible and Near Infrared,0.6 μm –1.6 μm – For recording cloud cover during the day Infrared,3.9 μm –7.3 μm,8.7 μm, –13. Even wind can be determined by cloud patterns, alignments and movement from successive photos, Infrared pictures depict ocean eddies or vortices and map currents such as the Gulf Stream which are valuable to the shipping industry. Fishermen and farmers are interested in knowing land and water temperatures to protect their crops against frost or increase their catch from the sea, even El Niño phenomena can be spotted. Using color-digitized techniques, the gray shaded thermal images can be converted to color for easier identification of desired information, each meteorological satellite is designed to use one of two different classes of orbit, geostationary and polar orbiting
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Global Precipitation Measurement
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Global Precipitation Measurement is a joint mission between JAXA and NASA as well as other international space agencies to make frequent observations of Earth’s precipitation. It is part of NASAs Earth Systematic Missions program and works with a constellation to provide full global coverage. GPM builds on the successes of the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission. The project is managed by NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center, and consists of a GPM Core Observatory satellite assisted by a constellation of spacecraft from other agencies and missions. The Core Observatory satellite measures the two and three dimensional structure of Earth’s precipitation patterns and provides a new standard for the rest of the satellite constellation. The GPM Core Observatory was assembled and tested at Goddard Space Flight Center, the launch occurred on February 28,2014 at 3, 37am JST on the first attempt. Agencies in the United States, Japan, India and France operate the satellites in the constellation for agency-specific goals. The DPR is a radar, providing three-dimensional maps of storm structure across its swath. The DPR has two frequencies, allowing researchers to estimate the sizes of particles and detect a wider range of precipitation rates. The Ku-band radar, similar to the PR on TRMM, covers a 245 km swath, nested inside that, the Ka-band radar covers a 120 km swath. The GMI is a sensor that observes the microwave energy emitted by the Earth. These data allow quantitative maps of precipitation across a swath that is 885 km wide and this instrument continues the legacy of TRMM microwave observations, while adding four additional channels, better resolution, and more reliable calibration. GPM produces and distributes a variety of precipitation data products. Processing takes place at the Precipitation Processing System at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, all data from the mission is made freely available to the public on NASA websites. NASA Socials JAXA-NASA DC Cherry Blossom Event April 12,2013, at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland GPM Media DayFriday, bharghav discuss the importance of GPM and its positive impact on Earth. In the movie the GPM satellite is launched by the Space Shuttle, a short anime film of 6 minutes, Dual frequency Precipitation Radar Special Movie, was produced by JAXA and White Fox in 2013. Official website GPM videos Official website Global Precipitation Measurement/ Dual-frequency Precipitation Radar pamphlet videos Twitter and Facebook
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Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission
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The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission was a joint space mission between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency designed to monitor and study tropical rainfall. The term refers to both the mission itself and the satellite that the used to collect data. TRMM was part of NASAs Mission to Planet Earth, a long-term, the satellite was launched on November 27,1997 from the Tanegashima Space Center in Tanegashima, Japan. As of July 2014, fuel to maintain orbital altitude was insufficient and NASA ceased station-keeping maneuvers for TRMM, re-entry was originally expected sometime between May 2016 and November 2017. The probe was turned off on April 9,2015 after its orbital decay accelerated, re-entry occurred on June 16,2015 at 06,54 UTC. Tropical precipitation is a parameter to measure, due to large spatial and temporal variations. However, understanding tropical precipitation is important for weather and climate prediction, prior to TRMM, the distribution of rainfall worldwide was known to only a 50% degree of uncertainty. The concept for TRMM was first proposed in 1984, the science objectives, as first proposed, were, To advance understanding of the global energy and water cycles by providing distributions of rainfall and latent heating over the global Tropics. To provide rain and latent heating distributions to improve the initialization of models ranging from 24-hour forecasts to short-range climate variations. To help to understand, to diagnose, and to predict the onset and development of the El Niño, Southern Oscillation, to help to understand the effect that rainfall has on the ocean thermohaline circulations and the structure of the upper ocean. To allow cross calibration between TRMM and other sensors with life expectancies beyond that of TRMM itself, to evaluate the diurnal variability of tropical rainfall globally. To evaluate a system for rainfall measurements. Japan joined the study for the TRMM mission in 1986. The project received support from the U. S. congress in 1991. TRMM launched from Tanegashima Space Center on 27 November 1997, the Precipitation Radar was the first space-borne instrument designed to provide three-dimensional maps of storm structure. The measurements yielded information on the intensity and distribution of the rain, on the type, on the storm depth. The estimates of the heat released into the atmosphere at different heights based on these measurements can be used to improve models of the atmospheric circulation. The PR operated at 13.8 GHz and measured the 3-d rainfall distribution over land and it defined a layer depth of perception and hence measured rainfall that actually reached the latent heat of atmosphere
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Landsat 7
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Landsat 7 is the seventh satellite of the Landsat program. Launched on April 15,1999, Landsat 7s primary goal is to refresh the global archive of photos, providing up-to-date. The Landsat Program is managed and operated by the USGS, the NASA World Wind project allows 3D images from Landsat 7 and other sources to be freely navigated and viewed from any angle. The satellites companion, Earth Observing-1, trails by one minute, Landsat 7 was built by Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company. Landsat 7 was designed to last for five years, and has the capacity to collect and it is in a polar, sun-synchronous orbit, meaning it scans across the entire earths surface. With an altitude of 705 kilometers +/-5 kilometers, it takes 232 orbits, or 16 days, the satellite weighs 1973 kg, is 4.04 m long, and 2.74 m in diameter. Unlike its predecessors, Landsat 7 has a solid state memory of 378 gigabits, the main instrument on board Landsat 7 is the Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus. The SLC consists of a pair of mirrors that rotate about an axis in tandem with the motion of the main ETM+ scan mirror. The purpose of the SLC is to compensate for the motion of the spacecraft so that the resulting scans are aligned parallel to each other. Without the effects of the SLC, the instrument images the Earth in a fashion, resulting in some areas that are imaged twice. The net effect is that approximately 22% of the data in a Landsat 7 scene is missing when acquired without a functional SLC, following the SLC failure, an Anomaly Response Team was assembled, consisting of representatives from the USGS, NASA, and Hughes Santa Barbara Remote Sensing. The team assembled a list of possible scenarios, most of which pointed at a mechanical problem with the SLC itself. Since there is no backup SLC, a failure would indicate that the problem was permanent. However, the team was unable to rule out the possibility of an electrical failure, though such a possibility was deemed remote. This operation was successful, and on September 5,2003 and it was immediately apparent that the migration to the Side-B electrical harness had not fixed the problem with the SLC. Following this, the instrument was reconfigured again to use its primary electrical harness, the subsequent conclusion of the ART was that the SLC problem was mechanical and permanent in nature. Landsat 7 continues to acquire data in this mode, Data products are available with the missing data optionally filled in using other Landsat 7 data selected by the user. In 2013, Landsat 7 was joined by Landsat 8, the contract was part of the NASA Scientific Data Purchase which was administrated through NASAs John C. Stennis Space Center
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QuikSCAT
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The NASA QuikSCAT is an Earth observation satellite carrying the SeaWinds scatterometer. Its primary mission is to measure the wind speed and direction over the ice-free global oceans. This SeaWinds scatterometer is referred to as the QuikSCAT scatterometer to distinguish it from the nearly identical SeaWinds scatterometer flown on the ADEOS-2 satellite, QuikSCAT was launched on 19 June 1999 with an initial 3-year mission requirement. QuikSCAT was a recovery mission replacing the NASA Scatterometer, which failed prematurely in June 1997 after just 9.5 months in operation. The QuikSCAT geophysical data record spans from 19 July 1999 to 21 November 2009, because of its wide swath and lack of in-swath gaps, QuikSCAT was able to collect at least one vector wind measurement over 93% of the Worlds Oceans each day. This improved significantly over the 77% coverage provided by NSCAT, each day, QuikSCAT recorded over 400,000 measurements of wind speed and direction. This is hundreds of more surface wind measurements than are collected routinely from ships. QuikSCAT provided measurements of the speed and direction referenced to 10 meters above the sea surface at a spatial resolution of 25 km. Wind information cannot be retrieved within 15–30 km of coastlines or in the presence of sea ice, precipitation generally degrades the wind measurement accuracy, although useful wind and rain information can still be obtained in mid-latitude and tropical cyclones for monitoring purposes. It can, however, still measure radar backscatter at an azimuth angle. A NASA Senior Review panel in 2011 endorsed the continuation of the QuikSCAT mission with these objectives through 2013. SeaWinds uses a dish antenna with two spot beams that sweep in a circular pattern. The antenna consists of a 1-meter diameter rotating dish that produces two spot beams, sweeping in a circular pattern and it radiates 110 W microwave pulses at a pulse repetition frequency of 189 Hz. QuikSCAT operates at a frequency of 13.4 GHz, which is in the Ku-band of microwave frequencies, at this frequency, the atmosphere is mostly transparent to non-precipitating clouds and aerosols, although rain produces significant alteration of the signal. The spacecraft is in an orbit, with equatorial crossing times of ascending swaths at about 06,00 LST ±30 minutes. Along the equator, consecutive swaths are separated by 2,800 km, QuikSCAT orbits Earth at an altitude of 802 km and at a speed of about 7 km per second. Scatterometers such as QuikSCAT emit pulses of microwave radiation and measure the power reflected back to its receiving antenna from the wind-roughened sea surface. Gravity and capillary waves on the sea caused by the wind reflect or backscatter power emitted from the scatterometer radar primarily by means of a Bragg resonance condition
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ACRIMSAT
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The Active Cavity Radiometer Irradiance Monitor Satellite, or ACRIMSAT is a defunct satellite and instrument that was one of the 21 observational components of NASAs Earth Observing System program. The instrument followed upon the ACRIM1 and ACRIM2 instruments that were launched on multi-instrument satellite platforms, ACRIMSAT was launched on 20 December 1999 from Vandenberg Air Force Base as the secondary payload on the Taurus rocket that launched KOMPSAT. It was placed into a high inclination,700 km. sun-synchronous orbit from which the ACRIM3 instrument monitored total solar irradiance, contact with the satellite was lost on 14 December 2013. ACRIM3 made measurements of the TSI since the start of its mission in April 2000 and it extended the TSI measurement database begun by earlier ACRIM instruments on the NASA Solar Maximum Mission and Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite. ACRIMSAT/ACRIM3 tracked TSI during a 2004 transit of Venus and measured the 0. 1% reduction in the solar intensity caused by the planets shadow and it also recorded data for the 2012 Transit of Venus. On 14 December 2013, ACRIMSAT went silent, with attempts to reestablish contact proving unsuccessful, the mostly likely cause has been attributed to the failure of aging batteries. The defunct spacecraft will remain in orbit for approximately 64 years before returning to Earth, Willson was the principal investigator and led the science team. Willson designed the active cavity radiometer type of sensor used by self-calibrating satellite TSI monitoring experiments, the ACRIM3 instrument was a collaboration between Willson, original JPL/ACRIMSAT Project Manager Ronald Zenone and ACRIM3 Instrument Scientist Roger Helizon. The Mission is controlled using the ACRIMSAT tracking station at the Jet Propulsion Labs Table Mountain Observatory in Southern California, co-Investigators are, Nicola Scafetta, Hugh Hudson and Alexander Mordvinov. ACRIMSAT is a spin-stabilized, single-purpose satellite constructed by Orbital Sciences Corporation and its total cost, including the instrument, launch, ground station, operations and science team activities during its 14-year mission was less than $50 million. AcrimSat Launch ACRIM Science Team homepage ACRIMSAT Project homepage Fact sheet on the mission ACRIMSAT, NASA Science Missions
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New Millennium Program
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New Millennium Program was a NASA project with focus on engineering validation of new technologies for space applications. Funding for the program was eliminated from the FY2009 budget by the 110th United States Congress, the spacecraft in the New Millennium Program were originally named Deep Space and Earth Observing. With a refocussing of the program in 2000, the Deep Space series was renamed Space Technology, Deep Space 1 – standalone spacecraft testing solar electric propulsion, autonomous operation etc. New Millennium Program site at Jet Propulsion Laboratory
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Earth Observing-1
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Its Advanced Land Imager measures nine different wavelengths simultaneously, instead of the seven measured by the imager in Landsat 7. This permits a greater flexibility in false-color imagery, in order to compare the two imagers, EO-1 follows Landsat 7 in its orbit by exactly one minute. EO-1 has also used to test new software, like the Autonomous Sciencecraft Experiment. This allows the spacecraft to decide for itself how best to create a desired image and it is only limited by a priority list of different types of images, and by forecasts of cloud cover provided by the NOAA. It was expected to function for months and was designed to function for eighteen months. Those expectations were greatly exceeded however the fuel was mostly depleted in February 2011. Small maneuvers have been successful for debris avoidance but long duration burns for orbit maintenance are not being performed due to insufficient fuel, EO-1 was deactivated on 30 March 2017. At its current altitude, it is estimated that the satellite will remain in orbit until the 2050s, Earth observation satellite EO1 Mission Overview. Delta 2 Rocket Puts Three Satellites into Earth Orbit, Earth Observing-1 at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
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Jason-1
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The lineage of the name begins with the JASO1 meeting in Toulouse, France to study the problems of assimilating altimeter data in models. Jason as an acronym also stands for Joint Altimetry Satellite Oceanography Network, additionally it is used to reference the mythical quest for knowledge of Jason and the Argonauts. It is the successor to the TOPEX/Poseidon mission, which measured ocean surface topography from 1992 through 2005, like its predecessor, Jason-1 is a joint project between the NASA and CNES space agencies. Jason-1s successor, the Ocean Surface Topography Mission on the Jason-2 satellite, was launched in June 2008 and these satellites provide a unique global view of the oceans that is impossible to acquire using traditional ship-based sampling. As did TOPEX/Poseidon, Jason-1 uses an altimeter to measure the hills and these measurements of sea surface topography allow scientists to calculate the speed and direction of ocean currents and monitor global ocean circulation. The global ocean is Earths primary storehouse of solar energy, Jason-1s measurements of sea surface height reveal where this heat is stored, how it moves around Earth by ocean currents, and how these processes affect weather and climate. Jason-1 was launched on December 7,2001 from Californias Vandenberg Air Force Base aboard a Delta II rocket, during the first months Jason-1 shared an almost identical orbit to TOPEX/Poseidon, which allowed for cross calibration. At the end of period, the older satellite was moved to a new orbit midway between each Jason ground track. Jason has a cycle of 10 days. On 16 March 2002, Jason-1 experienced a sudden attitude upset, soon after this incident, two new small pieces of space debris were observed in orbits slightly lower than Jason-1s, and spectroscopic analysis eventually proved them to have originated from Jason-1. In 2011, it was determined that the pieces of debris had most likely been ejected from Jason-1 by an unidentified, small high-speed particle hitting one of the spacecrafts solar panels. Orbit maneuvers in 2009 put the Jason-1 satellite on the side of Earth from the Jason-2 satellite. Jason-1 now flies over the region of the ocean that Jason-2 flew over five days earlier. Its ground tracks fall midway between those of Jason-2, which are about 315 kilometers apart at the equator and this interleaved tandem mission provides twice the number of measurements of the oceans surface, bringing smaller features such as ocean eddies into view. The tandem mission also helps pave the way for a future ocean altimeter mission that would much more detailed data with its single instrument than the two Jason satellites now do together. The program is named after the Greek mythological hero Jason, Jason-1 has five 5 instruments, Poseidon 2 - Nadir pointing Radar Altimeter using C band and Ku band for measuring height above sea surface. Jason Microwave Radiometer - measures water vapor along altimeter path to correct for pulse delay DORIS for orbit determination to within 10 cm or less, the Jason-1 satellite, its altimeter instrument and a position-tracking antenna were built in France. The radiometer, Global Positioning System receiver and laser retroreflector array were built in the United States, TOPEX/Poseidon and Jason-1 have led to major advances in the science of physical oceanography and in climate studies
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Ocean Surface Topography Mission
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Like its two predecessors, OSTM/Jason-2 uses high-precision ocean altimetry to measure the distance between the satellite and the ocean surface to within a few centimeters. OSTM/Jason-2 was launched at 07,46 UTC on June 20,2008, from Space Launch Complex 2W at the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, USA, the spacecraft separated from the rocket 55 minutes later. It is now in a 1,336 km circular, non-sun-synchronous orbit at an inclination of 66 degrees to Earths equator, Jason-1 has been moved to the opposite side of Earth and now flies over the same region of the ocean that Jason-2 flew over five days earlier. Jason-1s ground tracks fall midway between those of Jason-2, which are about 315 kilometers apart at the equator and this interleaved tandem mission provides twice the number of measurements of the oceans surface, bringing smaller features such as ocean eddies into view. The tandem mission also helps pave the way for a future ocean altimeter mission that would much more detailed data with its single instrument than the two Jason satellites now do together. With OSTM/Jason-2, ocean altimetry makes the transition from research into operational mode and these instruments send a microwave pulse to the ocean’s surface and time how long it takes to return. A microwave radiometer corrects any delay that may be caused by water vapor in the atmosphere, other corrections are also required to account for the influence of electrons in the ionosphere and the dry air mass of the atmosphere. Combining these data with the location of the spacecraft makes it possible to determine sea-surface height to within a few centimetres. The strength and shape of the signal also provides information on wind speed. These data are used in models to calculate the speed and direction of ocean currents and the amount and location of heat stored in the ocean. Another payload aboard Jason-2 is the T2L2 instrument, T2L2 is used to synchronize atomic clocks at ground stations, and to calibrate the on-board clock of the Jason-2 DORIS instrument. On 6 November 2008 CNES reported the T2L2 instrument was working well, OSTM/Jason-2 is a joint effort by four organizations. After completing the on-orbit commissioning of the spacecraft, CNES handed over operation, CNES will process, distribute and archive the research-quality data products that will become available in 2009. EUMETSAT will process and distribute operational data received by its station to users in Europe. NOAA will process and distribute operational data received by its stations to non-European users. NOAA and EUMETSAT will generate the products and distribute them to users. NASA will evaluate the performance of its instruments, the microwave radiometer, the Global Positioning System payload. In addition, NASA and CNES will validate scientific data products, NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, manages the mission for NASAs Science Mission Directorate in Washington
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Jason-3
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Jason-3 is the result of a four-agency international partnership consisting of NOAA, NASA, the French Space Agency CNES, and EUMETSAT. The spacecraft was built by Thales Alenia Space and launched by SpaceX on the 21st Falcon 9 flight, a pair of deployable, tracking solar arrays supply a total of 580 watts of power. Four hydrazine monopropellant thrusters are used for orbital maneuvering, attitude control is provided by reaction wheels, with magnetorquers used to periodically despin the wheels. Jason-3 weighed about 553 kg at launch, with a dry mass of 525 kg, the primary instrument is the Poseidon-3B Altimeter, which is derived from the Poseidon-3 carried on Jason-2. The other main instruments are Doppler Orbitography and Radiopositioning Integrated by Satellite, Advanced Microwave Radiometer-2, Global Positioning System Payload, two additional passenger instruments are carried as part of the Joint Radiation Experiment. These are CARMEN-3, which measures charged particle flux, and Light Particle Telescope, appearing on the SpaceX manifest as early as July 2013, Jason-3 was originally scheduled for launch on July 22,2015. However, this date was pushed back to August 19 following the discovery of contamination in one of the thrusters, requiring the thruster to be replaced. The launch was delayed by several months due to the loss of a Falcon 9 rocket with the CRS-7 mission on June 28. A 7-second static fire test of the rocket was completed on January 11,2016, the Launch Readiness Review was signed off by all parties on January 15,2016, and the launch proceeded successfully on January 17,2016, at 18,42 UTC. The Jason-3 payload was deployed into its orbit at 830 miles altitude after an orbital insertion burn about 56 minutes into the flight. It was the 21st Falcon 9 flight overall and the second into an orbit from Vandenberg Air Force Base Space Launch Complex 4E in California. This attempt followed the first successful landing and booster recovery on the launch in December 2015. The controlled descent through the atmosphere and landing attempt for each booster is an arrangement that is not used on other launch vehicles. Approximately nine minutes into the flight, the video feed from the drone ship went down due to the losing its lock on the uplink satellite. Elon Musk later reported that the first stage did touch down smoothly on the ship, debris from the fire, including several rocket engines attached to the octaweb assembly, arrived back to shore on board the floating landing platform on January 18,2016
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Meteor (satellite)
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The Meteor spacecraft are weather observation satellites launched by the USSR and Russia. The Meteor satellite series was developed during the 1960s, the Meteor satellites were designed to monitor atmospheric and sea-surface temperatures, humidity, radiation, sea ice conditions, snow-cover, and clouds. Meteor 1-26 is considered to be the most likely candidate for a the 7 January 2016 satellite near collision, meteor-1 launches Meteor-2-21/Fizeau is the twenty-first and last in the Meteor-2 series of Russian meteorological satellites, which were launched 22 times from 1975 to 1993. ILRS Mission Support Status, Satellite Laser Ranging tracking support of satellite was discontinued in October 1998. What makes Meteor-2-21 distinctive from the other meteorological satellites is its unique retroreflector array, Fizeau is named after a French physicist, Armand Fizeau, who in 1851 conducted an experiment which tested for the aether convection coefficient. SLR tracking of this satellite was used for orbit determination. The Fizeau experiment tests the theory of special relativity – that distance events that are simultaneous for one observer will not be simultaneous for an observer in motion relative to the first. The central cube is made of fused silica and has a two-lobe Far Field Diffraction Pattern providing nearly equal intensities for compensated and uncompensated velocity aberration, both outer reflectors have aluminum coating on the reflecting surfaces and near-diffraction-limited FFDPs. One of the end reflectors is made of fused silica with an index of refraction of 1.46, the other end reflector is made of fused glass with an index of refraction of 1.62 and should provide a perfect compensation of the velocity aberration. SLR full-rate data from MOBLAS4, MOBLAS7, and Maidanak seem to confirm the presence of the influence of the Fizeau effect. Resur-1, another Russian satellite launched in 1994, has 2 corner cubes reflectors with near diffraction-limited FFDPs, WESTPAC, a future SLR satellite, will verify indisputably the existence or otherwise of the Fizeau effect. All the satellites were launched on Tsyklon-3 rockets and these satellites provide weather information including data on clouds, ice and snow cover, atmospheric radiation and humidity. The Meteor-3 class of satellites orbit in a higher altitude than the Meteor-2 class of satellites thus providing more coverage of the Earths surface. The Meteor-3 has the payload as the Meteor-2 but also includes an advanced scanning radiometer with better spectral and spatial resolution. Meteorological data is transmitted to four sites in the former Soviet Union in conjunction with about 80 other smaller sites. Meteor-3 launches Meteor-3-5, launched in 1991, is in a higher orbit than Meteor-2-21. Mechanically, it is similar to Meteor-2-21, which satellite was in operation depended on the sun angles and consequently the seasons. Meteor-3-5 was usually the summer satellite while 2-21 was in operation for approximately the half-year centered on winter, the satellite carried the second Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer aloft as the first and the last American-built instrument to fly on a Soviet spacecraft
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