ESA's Living Planet Symposium: Innovative SMOS

The satellite carries an innovative sensor to image brightness temperature. As key observables, these images are used as input to derive global maps of soil moisture and ocean salinity. Given the success of the mission so far, the maps are expected to be available by the autumn.

Today, a focus at ESA's Living Planet Symposium is on the innovative SMOS mission, which recently became operational.

Early results are proving very encouraging with its first observations due to be released in early July.

ESA's Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite was launched in November to gather data on moisture in the surface layers of soil and salt in the surface of the oceans.

SMOS will improve our understanding of the water cycle and help advance weather and climate studies.

SMOS has completed an intense programme of calibration and commissioning and, in May, it formally began its operational life delivering data.

Although it is still early days, scientists and users are very impressed with the first snapshots of 'brightness temperature' - the microwave radiation emitted from Earth's surface.

ESA's Mission Manager, Susanne Mecklenburg said, "We still have some way to go before the full soil moisture and ocean salinity data products are available, but the brightness temperature data we have been working on for the past months clearly demonstrate what this advanced mission has to offer."

The satellite carries an innovative sensor to image brightness temperature. As key observables, these images are used as input to derive global maps of soil moisture and ocean salinity. Given the success of the mission so far, the maps are expected to be available by the autumn.

To test the usefulness of SMOS data for numerical weather prediction, data are also being delivered, within three hours of sensing, to meteorological centres such as the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts
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'Cold fusion' moves closer to mainstream acceptance

'Cold fusion' moves closer to mainstream acceptance ScienceBlog.com

"Years ago, many scientists were afraid to speak about 'cold fusion' to a mainstream audience," said Jan Marwan, Ph.D., the internationally known expert who has organised the 'New Energy Technology' symposium.

Marwan heads the research firm, Dr. Marwan Chemie in Berlin, Germany. The symposium will include nearly 50 presentations describing the latest discoveries on the topic, including cold fusion.

The presentations describe invention of an inexpensive new measuring device that could enable more labs to begin cold fusion research; indications that cold fusion may occur naturally in certain bacteria; progress toward a battery based on cold fusion; and a range of other topics.

Marwan noted that many of the presentations suggest that cold fusion is real, with the potential to positively contribute to alternative energy supplies in the 21st Century.

"Now most of the scientists are no longer afraid and most of the cold fusion researchers are attracted to the ACS meeting," Marwan said. "I've also noticed that the field is gaining new researchers from universities that had previously not pursued cold fusion research. More and more people are becoming interested in it.

Clearly, there's still some resistance to this field but we just have to keep on as we have done so far, exploring cold fusion step by step, and that will make it a successful alternative energy source. With time and patience, I'm really optimistic we can do this!"

The term "cold fusion" originated in 1989 when Martin Fleishmann and Stanley Pons claimed achieving nuclear fusion at room temperature with a simple, inexpensive tabletop device.

That claim created an international sensation, because nuclear fusion holds the potential for providing our world with a virtually limitless and arguably, clean, new source of energy.

Fuel for fusion comes from ordinary seawater, and estimates indicate that 1 gallon of seawater packs the energy equivalent of 16 gallons of gasoline at 100 percent efficiency for energy production.

The claim also ignited scepticism, because conventional wisdom said that achieving fusion required multi-billion-dollar fusion reactors that operate at tens of millions of degrees Fahrenheit.

When other scientists could not reproduce the Pons-Fleishmann results, research on cold fusion fell into disrepute.

To read the full article, click here.

ESA ENVISAT Symposium: Beautiful Norway

Under the sea in Norway
Hardangerjøkulen, the sixth largest glacier in mainland Norway, is located to the east of the most northern inland branch of the Hardangerfjord.

It served as the ice planet Hoth in the 1980 movie Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back.

With its long coastline and pristine fjords, Norway enjoys good conditions for raising fish stocks. Today, some 800 fish farms dot its coastline, and fish is the third most important export product after oil/gas and metal.

In terms of Atlantic salmon, Norway is the leading fish farming country in the world.

North of Hardangerfjord is the city of Bergen, which will host ESA’s Living Planet Symposium, from 28 June – 2 July 2010.

Nearly 1000 scientific researchers and data users are expected to attend the symposium, previously named the Envisat Symposium, where they will present results and compare findings of ongoing research activities using data from ESA’s Envisat, ERS-2, Earth Explorers and Third Party Mission satellites.

This image was acquired by Envisat's Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) instrument on 9 February 2010, working in Full Resolution mode to provide a spatial resolution of 300 m.