By Zachary Shahan •
January 6, 2010
Well, they have done it before, but were stopped by the Bush administration in 2001. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has its own satellites and state-of-the-art sensors that it is going to start sharing with climate scientists again, in order to unlock some climate change and environmental mysteries.
Approximately 60 climate scientists (from academia, industry and federal agencies) have received the appropriate clearance now to access this information in order to further understand the current and future effects of climate change on the environment.
Officials state clearly that this is not taking away from other intelligence gathering missions in the least.
By Zachary Shahan •
September 25, 2009
This week in the journal Nature scientists give the most comprehensive view of thinning ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica to date.
Scientists from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and the University of Bristol analyzed 50 million satellite measurements (from NASA) to show the massive ice loss on these polar giants.
The result are surprising, even to the scientists.
By Ariel Schwartz •
July 28, 2008
Rising fuel costs have spurred some pretty wacky ideas. One that maybe isn’t so crazy is harvesting solar power from space. While the idea isn’t new—NASA and The US Department of Energy studied it throughout the 1970s—the time has come when it might not be too expensive to start pursuing it.
Pravna Mehta, the director of India operations for Space Island Group, a company working to develop solar satellites, thinks space energy has excellent potential. According to his vision, satellites would electromagnetically beam solar energy to ground-based receivers, where the energy would be converted to electricity and transferred to power grids.
Since satellites in high Earth orbits are unaffected by earth’s shadows, the energy would be available every day without fail.
