ESA ISS Astronaut detects the Orange glow over Africa

ESA Astronaut Alexander Gerst reports that "When light from the Cupola tints the inside of the ISS orange, I can tell we're over Africa without even looking out the window." 

Credit: ESA, Alexander Gerst

Earth from Space: Africa’s largest and highest

The border region of southern Kenya and northern Tanzania, with a small portion of south eastern Uganda, is pictured in this image, acquired by Envisat’s MERIS instrument on 4 January 2012.

In the lower-right portion of the image, we can see the snows of Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest mountain at 5895 m above sea level. 

North of Mount Kilimanjaro is Mount Kenya, the second-highest mountain in Africa. 

The area pictured is part of the East African Rift, an area where two tectonic plates are moving apart from one another, making this home to a number of both active and dormant volcanoes.

For further information and a higher resolution of this image, please visit: www.esa.int

ESA Astronaut Image: Mountain 'Veins' in the Somalian desert

'Veins' in the Somalian desert

Credit: ESA/NASA

ESA ISS Image: Magical Island of Zanzibar

The fascinating island of Zanzibar, off the East African coast.

Credit: ESA/NASA

Mae Jemison: NASA's First African-American Woman in Space

Mae Carol Jemison was born in Decatur, Alabama, the youngest child of Charlie Jemison and Dorothy Green.

Her father was a maintenance supervisor for a charity organization, and her mother worked most of her career as an elementary school teacher of English and math at the Beethoven School in Chicago.

The family moved to Chicago, Illinois, when Jemison was three years old, to take advantage of better educational opportunities there.

Jemison says that as a young girl growing up in Chicago she always assumed she would get into space. "I thought, by now, we'd be going into space like you were going to work."

She said it was easier to apply to be a shuttle astronaut, "rather than waiting around in a cornfield, waiting for ET to pick me up or something."

As a child growing up, Jemison learned to make connections to science by studying nature. "It sounds a little gross, but I was fascinated with pus," Jemison said.

Once when a splinter infected her thumb as a little girl, Jemison's mother turned it into a learning experience. She ended up doing a whole project about pus.

Jemison wouldn't let anyone dissuade her from pursuing a career in science. "In kindergarten, my teacher asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I told her a scientist," Jemison says.

"She said, 'Don't you mean a nurse?' Now, there's nothing wrong with being a nurse, but that's not what I wanted to be."

Jemison says she was inspired by Martin Luther King Jr. but to her King's dream wasn't an elusive fantasy but a call to action. "Too often people paint him like Santa -- smiley and inoffensive," says Jemison. "But when I think of Martin Luther King, I think of attitude, audacity, and bravery."

Jemison thinks the civil rights movement was all about breaking down the barriers to human potential. "The best way to make dreams come true is to wake up," says Jemison.

Read more about Mae Jemison at Wikipedia

Still working hard for young people and encouraging them to take up challenges and follow their aspirations. She is seen here, at JPL, with actors from Hollywood.

Mae Jemison (second from the right) in JPL with producer, actors and crew of the Hollywood film 'Redtails', a film about the advenntures of the first African-American air force squadron in WWII.

African Space Research Programme work on the African Skyhawk jet

Volunteers from the African Space Research Programme work on the African Skyhawk jet in a suburb of Kampala, Uganda.

The programme aims to launch a Ugandan into space in the next decade.

Chris Nsamba says that at one time or another every successful scientist has been called a madman and in the rambling Ntinda suburb of Kampala it seems there were plenty of people who thought Nsamba was crazy when he embarked upon a project to send the first Ugandan into space - from the backyard of his mother's home.

Time will tell!

Picture: MICHELLE SIBILONI/AFP/Getty Images

Nyamuragira volcano erupts - DR Congo

Nyamuragira volcano errupts in Virunga National Park, Democratic Republic of Congo. Nyamuragira, Africa's most active volcano, erupted on Sunday night in a spectacular display of spewing lava, smoke and ash.

The eruption, which is still in progress, appears to be of no danger at this time to the surrounding population and the city of Goma, or the mountain gorillas and other wildlife.

Picture: LuAnne Cadd / Barcroft Media

Satellite Images of Human Presence on our Earth

Major road and rail networks in Europe, along with transmission line and underwater cable data, superimposed over satellite images of cities illuminated at night.

 Felix is the founder and director of Globaia, an organisation that seeks to enhance awareness of the impact and role of the human race on our world.

He has spent 13 years researching and presenting his theories to students, fellow academics and the general public.

"During this time I have been designing and presenting conferences on the global issues of our time," said Felix.

"I believe a picture is worth a thousand words, so I slowly started to improve my design skills to be able to show what I was explaining."

 "These pictures show several sides of global human activities," said 34-year-old Felix, from Montreal, Canada.

"We see everything from paved and unpaved roads, light pollution, railways, electricity transmission lines.

All the way to submarine cables, pipelines, shipping lanes and air traffic.

The show the extent of our civilisation, the patterns of our global sprawl, how human-influenced our planet now is."

Felix used US government sources like the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and the National Oceanic for railways, pipelines and roads as well as the Atmospheric Administration for the air traffic to piece together the visualisations.

Felix's visualisations showing how human technology has taken over our crowded planet come just one week before the global population is set to top seven billion.

The United Nations Populations Fund has revealed that by October 31st, there will be an extra billion people on the Earth compared to 1999.

Picture Credits: Felix Pharand-Deschenes / SPL/ Barcroft Media

ESA SMOS: Horn of Africa drought visible from space

The animation, derived from SMOS satellite data, shows soil moisture in the Horn of Africa from April to mid-July 2011.

The orange and yellow colouring depicts little to no moisture, while green and blue depict higher levels of soil moisture.

Credits: CESBIO/ESA

ESA: Horn of Africa drought seen from space - images

Intelsat New Dawn Launch Successful: Expands Africa’s Communications Infrastructure

Intelsat S.A., the world’s leading provider of fixed satellite services, announced today that Arianespace successfully launched the Intelsat New Dawn satellite.

The Ariane 5 vehicle lifted off from Kourou, French Guiana, at 5:37 p.m. (EDT), followed by spacecraft separation from the launch vehicle at 6:12 p.m. and signal acquisition at 6:29 p.m.

The Intelsat New Dawn satellite is owned by a joint venture between a consortium led by Convergence Partners and Intelsat.

The satellite’s 28 C-band and 24 Ku-band 36 MHz transponder units are designed specifically to supply critical communications infrastructure for African customers, who have experienced exceptional growth along with the development of the region.

Operating from a geostationary orbital slot at 32.8° East, Intelsat New Dawn will be ideally positioned to serve Africa through a payload optimized to deliver new capacity for voice, wireless backhaul, fixed line and wireless infrastructure, broadband and media– the fastest growing satellite-based applications in Africa.

“Intelsat and the African continent share a 40-year history in the development of Africa’s telecommunications infrastructure,” said Dave McGlade, Intelsat CEO.

“Intelsat New Dawn will be integrated with the resilient Intelsat fleet, allowing us to expand and enhance the vital communications services that are provided by our customers to business consumers throughout Africa.”

Andile Ngcaba, Chairman of Convergence Partners, said, “The satellite will not only deliver crucial services specifically tailored for Africa, it will also herald the dawn of a new era where Africans enjoy far greater involvement in the space communications industry.”

The True Size of Africa

Click on the picture to view the full image and stats

NASA Modis Image: Dust Plumes off Western Africa

large image (2 MB, JPEG) acquired September 15, 2010

Multicolored dust plumes blew off the coast of western Africa in mid-September 2010. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this natural-color image on September 15, 2010. An especially dense, dark plume blows over the Atlantic Ocean just south of the Western Sahara-Mauritania border. Around this plume are thinner, lighter plumes. The dust appears lightest in the north.

The varying colors of the plumes might result from different points of origin, or simply from different densities of dust. Source points for this dust storm aren’t obvious in this image, but sand seas sprawl over most of Mauritania, and the dust could have easily arisen from one or more localities in that country.

Dust clouds such as these can carry anthrax, which is endemic in the African soils, into Europe.

Slow Death to Chocolate?

Yes! Yes! Yes!

IT'S chocolate egg season again, and sales of the pagan and Christian symbols of rebirth are as strong as ever. But the hunt for Easter eggs may truly be on next year, because chocolate trees are in increasing trouble.

Chocolate is made from the fermented, roasted seeds of the cacao tree. The cacao swollen shoot virus (CSSV) can kill the trees, and threatens to slash this year's spring crop by a third in the world's biggest producer, Ivory Coast. Meanwhile a fungus called witches' broom is doing the same in Brazil. Now researchers are racing to sequence the cacao genome and find genes that can resist CSSV.

Cacao trees are native to the Amazon rainforest, but west Africa produces 70 per cent of the world's cocoa, virtually all on tiny, impoverished farms. In recent years, demand for chocolate has mushroomed. The farmers cannot afford expensive fertiliser so they boost production by planting more cacao trees over a greater area. That means cutting down other trees that normally grow between cacao crops, which also replicate their rainforest origins and give them the protective shade they prefer.

"Increasingly cacao is grown almost as a monoculture," says Paul Hadley of the University of Reading, UK. That promotes the spread of disease, as does the trend towards growing the trees in drier regions - water-stressed cacao trees are less able to fight off disease.