News
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ESA: New milestone for Sentinel-3 reached Thu Mar 7 2013A satellite platform, ESA's Sentinel-3, has been reached an important milestone. It has been delivered to Prime Contractor in France and will be installed and made up for a mission to monitor earth. Once complete, Sentinel-3 will host an array of a state of the art instruments which focuses on the measurement of different aspects of marine environments and land, as well as atmosphere and...
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Bhutan: First Disaster Management Bill passed Wed Mar 6 2013The Parliament of Bhutan passed on 27 February 2013 the Disaster Management Bill 2011, today, after almost four years of the bill being drafted, as the website BBS reported. Under the aegis of the Home and Cultural Affairs Ministry, the bill streamlines some response mechanisms. The Home Minister, Minjur Dorji, said the bill took some time in the cabinet, as sections had to be redone before the...
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UK: New fund for innovative technologies for humanitarian crises Tue Mar 5 2013The UK will set up a new fund to back mobile, text and other innovative technologies which can be used to help those hit by humanitarian crises - such as earthquakes, floods or drought. The new initiative was announced on 21 February 2013 by International Development Secretary Justine Greening. It has been created with the US Government and will be used to scale up existing projects and processes...
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NASA/NOAA: Next Generation Weather Satellite will provide earlier Warnings Mon Mar 4 2013NASA and NOAA are working on a new satellite system which will be launched in late 2015 for the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-R Series (GOES-R). GOES-R, part of a scientific collaboration between NASA and NOAA, will be the next generation of geostationary weather satellites. Both NASA and NOAA are hoping to improve severe weather detection with the help of this new...
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New Instrument on ISS to provide Imagery to Developing Nations Mon Mar 4 2013In January 2013, a new Earth-observing instrument was installed on the International Space Station (ISS): ISERV Pathfinder. The instrument consists of a commercial camera, a telescope, and a pointing system, all positioned to look through the Earth-facing window of ISS’s Destiny module. The camera allows taking high-resolution photographs at 3 to 7 frames per second, totaling as many as 100...
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More Complete Satellite Coverage in Africa Mon Mar 4 2013CET Teleport GmbH is expanding its cooperation with the satellite company SES in order to satisfy the increasing demand for satellite services in Africa. Thanks to the NSS-12 sat, linking Europe and East-Africa, the Eastern part of the African continent will be covered with Ku- and C-band. While demand in rural as well as urban areas could not be properly satisfied in the past, this agreement...
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Tsunami Risk: UN-SPIDER contributes to UNESCO-IOC guidelines Fri Mar 1 2013With the support of UNESCAP, UNESCO-IOC is carrying out a project entitled: “Enhancing Tsunami Risk Assessment and Management, Strengthening Policy Support and Developing Guidelines for Tsunami Exercises in Indian Ocean Countries”. This project will support the efforts of the ICG/IOTWS Working Group 1 on Tsunami Risk Assessment and Reduction and Working Group 3 on Tsunami Awareness...
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Sri Lanka: Making disaster risk information available Fri Mar 1 2013Sri Lanka is a country affected by a variety of hazards including Drought, Flood, Mass Movement, Severe Storm or Tsunami. In order to make information on disaster risks in Sri Lanka more easily available, the Disaster Management Center (DMC) in partnership with UNDP, NGOs and GDFRR Labs launched the Sri Lanka Disaster Risk Information Platform (RiskInfo). The purpose of RiskInfo is to make...
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Astrium: Seeking a non-European partner for GO-3G Thu Feb 28 2013For its newest geostationary Earth Observation satellite, GO-3G, the European aerospace company Astrium is seeking for a non-European partner, as SatelliteToday reported. According to reports, Astrium is reaching out to countries outside of Europe to help finance this venture. The company has indicated that Singapore could be one of the possible countries interested in the GO-3S. To entice...
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University of West Indies conducts geo-training Thu Feb 28 2013At the St. Augustine campus of the University of West Indies, host of a UN-SPIDER Regional Support Office, more than 40 Caribbean data managers, IT specialists and software developers concluded this weekend a one-week advanced training in "GeoNode". This open-source platform allows national ministries and agencies to populate, catalog, view, and share geospatial data on a central...
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Interim Report on GPS-Galileo Cooperation released Wed Feb 27 2013After the launch of the U.S.-EU Agreement on GPS-Galileo Cooperation in 2004, Working Group C (WG-C) has continuously been working on promoting cooperation on the design and development of the next generation of civil satellite-based navigation and timing systems. The recently released Interim Report provides information about the accomplishments of efforts to develop the concept of ARAIM (...
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UN: Disaster Management paramount for post-2015 agenda Tue Feb 26 2013As the frequency, severity and economic losses of disasters continue to increase across the globe, the United Nations’ first-ever global champion for disaster risk reduction, Indonesia's President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, kicked-off a two-day global meeting in Jakarta on 19 February, 2013 by backing calls for hardwiring disaster management into the global development agenda. The...
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UNESCAP: Workshop on geo-referenced Disaster Risk Management concluded Tue Feb 26 2013From 20 to 22 February, ESCAP (United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific) held a regional workshop on geo-referenced disaster risk management information systems for South-East and East Asia, and the Pacific. The workshop was held in Bangkok, Thailand and attracted participants from Cambodia, China, Cook Islands, Fiji, Indonesia, Kiribati, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Mongolia...
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International Charter activated for Cyclone in Madagascar Mon Feb 25 2013On 23 February 2013, the International Charter "Space and Major Disasters" was activated to provide satellite imagery and maps for responders to Cyclone Haruna. Haruna had had struck southwest Madagascar on Friday 22 February 2013. The Cyclone had made landfall as a Category 2 storm with wind speeds of up to 105 mph. The storm fuelled itself over Mozambique with gusty wind speeds of up...
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UN-SPIDER welcomes two new Regional Support Offices Mon Feb 25 2013On the sidelines of the fiftieth session of the Scientific and Technical Subcommittee of the Committee of the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, which took place in Vienna, Austria from 11 - 22 February 2013, UN-SPIDER signed agreements with two new partners to establish Regional Support Offices (RSO). On 12 February 2013, during the 4th annual UN-SPIDER Regional Support Offices meeting, the official...
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CSSTEAP: New training courses on space applications Mon Feb 25 2013The UN-affiliated Centre for Space Science and Technology Education in Asia and the Pacific (CSSTEAP) in India has announced its new training course programme 2013-2014 covering the fields of Remote Sensing and GIS, Satellite Communications, Satellite Meteorology and Global Climate and Space and Atmospheric Science. The courses are designed for scientists, engineers and university educators. The...
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Fiftieth Session of the COPUOS Scientific and Technical Subcommittee concluded Sat Feb 23 2013From 11 to 22 February 2013 the Fiftieth annual session of the Scientific and Technical Subcommittee (STSC) of the Committee on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) was held in Vienna, Austria. Representatives of 57 Member States attended the session discussing a variety of issues regarding the peaceful use of outer space for the benefit of humankind under the chairmanship of Félix...
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ESA's atomic clocks assess Galileo satnav performance Fri Feb 22 2013Satellite navigation systems are based on the highly precise measurement of time. A receiver on the ground pinpoints their positions by calculating how long signals from satellites in orbit take to reach it. This allows the receiver to fix the satellites' longitude, latitude and time. Atomic clocks on each satellite keep time to a matter of nanoseconds – billionths of a second –...
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Bush fires in Australia: NASA satellite captures hot spots Fri Feb 22 2013The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this image showing large bush fires burning in southwestern Victoria on February 18, 2013. Red outlines indicate hot spots where MODIS detected unusually warm surface temperatures associated with fires. Winds blew a long plume of smoke south toward the Bass Strait. About 300 firefighters using...
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USGS: Earthquakes will have higher impact Thu Feb 21 2013A new study by two USGS earthquake experts suggests that there will be more individual earthquakes with very large death tolls as well as more people dying during earthquakes than ever before. Thomas L. Holzer and his USGS coauthor James Savage studied earthquakes with death tolls of more than 50,000, which they define as catastrophic, and reported global death tolls from roughly 1500 A.D. to the...
