Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Spying on the Spooks

August 20, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Military Spy Satellite

From the courtyard of his house in the center of his Dutch hometown of Leiden, Marco Langbroek spies on American military satellites, and makes no secret about it. He blogs about it. While thousands of amateurs track the world’s orbiters, Langbroek is part of a small subset— about 20 loosely affiliated members from around the world: Russia, Canada, South Africa, Texas, he says—focused on covert launches. They’re generally not spies themselves, just enthusiastic fanboys. Langbroek, for example, earns his livelihood digging into the earth, not looking up at the heavens. ... Read More

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Texas, Tom and Jerry, and a Thirsty Planet

May 15, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
GRACE satellites, artist view

Every now and then, Byron Tapley steps outside with a pair of binoculars and trains them toward the late afternoon sky, hoping to catch a glint of sunlight reflecting from a pair of minivan-sized satellites he has nicknamed Tom and Jerry. Tapley has good reason to be proprietary: he leads the team of scientists who launched the twin satellites in 2002. Working in tandem, the satellites orbit the earth from pole to pole every 90 minutes, recording tiny variations in the earth’s gravitational field caused by the movement of vast amounts of water. The two spacecraft have provided compelling ... Read More

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A Possible Solution for Space Junk

February 15, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Most adventures begin with great excitement, gradually become mundane, and ultimately conclude with a visit from the clean-up crew. Space flight, it seems, is no exception. Scientists in Switzerland are planning to send a “janitor satellite” into the atmosphere to combat space debris, a menace Miller-McCune has sounded alarms over a few times in recent years. As Miller-McCune’s David Richardson has documented, roughly 28,000 man-made objects are hurtling around the planet at speeds around 15,000 miles per hour. Everything from active satellites to miniscule detritus from decades of ... Read More

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Snagging Free-Range Solar Power in Space Is an Option

October 25, 2009 • By • 2 Comments

Of the billions of points of light burning in the distance, the nearest bears down on our tiny planet from only eight light minutes. Bound to us by nothing but gravity and an intervening black void, once above the confines of our own atmosphere, the sun is a startling revelation. Sunlight can easily turn the surface of our dusty moon from gunpowder gray into a blindingly bright sphere. Although such reflected visible radiation represents only a fraction of our own star's massive power, the question is: How do we best harness such energy? Our own star essentially represents one ... Read More

More like this: Environment, Science, Science & Environment
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Finding Water from Outer Space

October 19, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
Angola_map_ForWeb

The Land Cruiser rattles and bumps down a stripe of rutted dirt carving through the brush in this remote corner of southern Angola. Half a mile to the west, the tranquil blue Atlantic glimmers in the African sun. To the east, miles of spiky desert grass fade away to a range of sere mountains. The last village lies miles behind us, the next miles ahead. In the front seat, Alain Gachet, a plump, boyish 58-year-old, his thick crest of silver hair crammed under a leather Indiana Jones hat, is focused intently on the laptop balanced on his knees. The computer is plugged into a tiny GPS unit set ... Read More

More like this: Cover Story, Environment, Magazine Feature Story, November-December 2009, Science, Science & Environment
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Spacefarers Need A Wiki

May 27, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

If on your way to work each day, you had to negotiate a gantlet of tens of thousands of dangerous obstacles, moving at speeds up to 17,000 miles per hour, and no one could tell you where the next one might come from, you might be inclined to raise the issue with your congressman. Though it sounds like a video game, it's close to reality for satellite operators who face a similar situation 24 hours a day, constantly on the lookout for the perilous approach of space junk and careering satellites. In the wake of the Cosmos Iridium collision, which dispersed thousands of chunks of debris in ... Read More

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Space Probe to Measure How Sloshed Mother Earth Is

March 16, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

What do the fates of the tiny Pacific island nations of Tuvalu, Tonga, Kiribati and the Russian launch of a gleaming new European gravity satellite have in common? Gravity itself. Variations in Earth's gravity field — which is a reflection of how Earth's mass is distributed around the planet — is as subject to the constant motions of the world's oceans as it is from massive mountain chains. And in how those seas slosh around the globe lies the fate of some 600 million people living in low-lying nations and coastal areas around the world. Their futures are linked inextricably to ... Read More

More like this: Environment, Science & Environment
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Looking for a Traffic Cop in Space

February 19, 2009 • By • 1 Comment

Hours before an out-of-control Russian Kosmos satellite and an Iridium communications satellite collided 485 miles above Siberia last week, Robert Bell, the executive director of the Society of Satellite Professionals International, told Miller-McCune.com about his hopes for some form of traffic-control system in space. "It's hard to get agreement on anything," he said. "There hasn't been much progress beyond the finger-pointing stage," and "unless we do it properly, we could run into big problems." Twenty-four hours later, those problems made themselves plain with the first collision of ... Read More

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Seeing the Forest and the Trees

April 7, 2008 • By • 1 Comment

Each year, as winter fades and temperatures begin to rise, satellite sensors record the first appearance of spring foliage over the eastern United States. These images capture an expanding front of green spanning the region and advancing from the south. Mark Schwartz, professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, calls it the “green wave” and says these satellite images are just one perspective to study the timing of biological events in nature. Though satellite technology is one of the newer tools available for use in the study of nature’s calendar, this science ... Read More

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