NASA Earth Observatory: New Studies Examine Climate/Vegetation Links

Two new spaceborne Earth-observing instruments will help scientists better understand how global forests and ecosystems are affected by changes in climate and land use change. 

This image of the Amazon rainforest is from a 2010 global map of the height of the world's forests based on multiple satellite datasets. 

Image courtesy NASA Earth Observatory.

NASA has selected proposals for two new instruments, including one from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, that will observe changes in global vegetation from the International Space Station.

UMD will develop the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation Lidar (GEDI) for up to $94 million while JPL will build the ECOsystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment (ECOSTRESS) on Space Station for as much as $30 million, NASA said Wednesday.

The sensors will give scientists new ways to see how forests and ecosystems are affected by changes in climate or in land use.

A high-resolution, multiple-wavelength imaging spectrometer from JPL will study the effectiveness of water use by vegetation.

This instrument will be completed in 2018 and will not cost more than $30 million. A laser-based system from the University of Maryland, College Park, will observe the structure of forest canopy. This instrument will be completed in 2019 and will not cost more than $94 million.

John Grunsfeld

"We are excited to expand the use of the International Space Station to make critical Earth observations that will help scientists understand the diversity of forests and vegetation and their response to a changing climate," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

"These innovative Earth Venture Instruments will join a growing suite of NASA Earth-observing sensors to be deployed to the station starting this year."

The instruments were competitively selected from 20 proposals submitted to NASA's Earth Venture Instrument program.

Part of the Earth System Science Pathfinder program (ESSP), Earth Venture investigations are small, targeted science investigations that complement NASA's larger research missions.

The National Research Council recommended in 2007 that NASA undertake this type of regularly solicited, quick-turnaround project. The program's first selection was awarded in 2010.

Simon Hook of JPL is the principal investigator for the ECOsystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station (ECOSTRESS).

This project will use a high-resolution thermal infrared radiometer to measure plant evapotranspiration, the loss of water from growing leaves and evaporation from the soil.

These data will reveal how ecosystems change with climate and provide a critical link between the water cycle and effectiveness of plant growth, both natural and agricultural.

The ECOSTRESS team has extensive experience in development and analysis of thermal infrared spectroscopic images of Earth's surface.

Amazon Electric Ghost Knifefish inspire underwater robotics research

Northwestern has developed a number of robotic prototypes based on the Ghost Knifefish.

Electric Ghost Knifefish from South America are opening up new ideas in robotics.

Knifefish put a small current through the water to sense their environment, and undulate a long fin to move around.

Scientists at the Neuroscience and Robotics Lab in Northwestern University, US, believe both features could be harnessed in a new class of autonomous underwater vehicles.

They are developing robots that will be able to swim around debris in total darkness, such as inside a sunken ship.


"Today, we don't really have underwater robots that work well in really cluttered conditions or in conditions where vision isn't useful," said Prof Malcolm MacIver.

"Just consider the sunken cruise ship. It is very dangerous to send divers into such situations where the water can be very cloudy.

"But we can learn from the electric fish. They don't use vision to hunt at night in the rivers of the Amazon basin, and their movement through the cluttered root masses and flooded forests requires incredible precision. They fit a big hole in terms of our capabilities in underwater robots."

Prof MacIver was explaining his work here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

He has studied knifefish for years, deciphering their sensory and locomotion systems.

The animals generate an electric field from modified neurons running along their spinal cord. When prey, such as aquatic insects, enter this field the fish measure a tiny change in voltage at the surface of their skin.

The perturbation is only one-tenth to one-hundredth of a millionth of a volt, but sufficient for the receptors to detect it.

Knifefish hunt in darkess

"The fish have evolved an amazing system," said Prof MacIver.

"Imagine your retina stretched over your entire body and what that would be like. That's the situation that knifefish find themselves in.

"They perceive in all directions. They emit a kind of radar, but it's an electric field; and the sensory receptors scattered over their entire body surface mean they can detect things coming from all directions."

The technology in Prof MacIver's lab is now simulating this enabling a robot in a tank to react to what is around it and move accordingly.

But it is the special propulsion technique employed by knifefish that the Northwestern researcher also wants to copy.


"The knifefish inspired GhostBot. We've built one of the most advanced fish robots in the world, with 34 degrees of freedom (the humanoid robot ASIMO has 26; the Roomba floor vacuum robot has 2), to better understand knifefish mechanics and sensorimotor coupling. "

"The video is the first where we discovered that inward counter-propagating waves generate a strong downward jet, producing vertical thrust. "

"This is a key element of knifefish maneuverability. The water is seeded with reflective particles for subsequent particle imaging velocimetry. "

You will see that the ripples sent through the long fin on the belly undulate one way, and the fish will move forward; undulate the other way, and the direction of travel is reversed.

Use counter-propagating waves that meet in the middle, and the fish will move up.

"From all our simulations, we now have mathematical relationships between things like the frequency and amplitude of the travelling wave and how much propulsion you get," said Prof MacIver.

"So now we can put that into technology and get it to work properly."

Currently, the Northwestern lab is demonstrating artificial sensory and locomotion capabilities on two separate robotic platforms. The aim now is to bring them together into a single working device.

ESA Envisat Image: Juruá River in the Amazon rainforest

Snaking River

Credit: European Space Agency

The Juruá River snakes slowly through the half-flooded Amazon rainforest in western Brazil, leaving free-standing oxbow lakes in its wake, which form when a river changes course as it meanders through a floodplain.

The Juruá is the most winding river in the Amazon basin and one of the Amazon River's longest tributaries, exceeding 2,040 miles (3,283 kilometers) in length. Tropical rainforests have some of the largest rivers in the world because of the tremendous amount of precipitation their watersheds receive.

Amazon Founder Finds Apollo 11 Moon Rocket Engines On Atlantic Ocean Floor

This NASA file photo shows the first stage of the mighty Saturn V rocket used to launch the historic Apollo 11 moon landing mission in 1969 as the booster was being built. The five huge F-1 rocket engines were discarded into the Atlantic Ocean after the July 16, 1969 launch.

CREDIT: NASA

When NASA's mighty Saturn V rocket launched the historic Apollo 11 mission to land the first men on the moon in 1969, the five powerful engines that powered the booster's first stage dropped into the Atlantic Ocean and were lost forever.

Lost, that is, until now.

A private expedition financed by Amazon.com founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos has discovered the five F-1 rocket engines used to launch Apollo 11 into space on July 16, 1969 and is drawing up plans to retrieve one or more so they can be publicly displayed.

"I'm excited to report that, using state-of-the-art deep sea sonar, the team has found the Apollo 11 engines lying 14,000 feet below the surface, and we're making plans to attempt to raise one or more of them from the ocean floor," Bezos wrote in a statement posted to the Bezos Expeditions website.

"We don't know yet what condition these engines might be in - they hit the ocean at high velocity and have been in salt water for more than 40 years. On the other hand, they're made of tough stuff, so we'll see."

Amazon Spaceship fails on test flight

An unmanned spacecraft bankrolled by Amazon.com supremo Jeff Bezos has failed during a test flight.

The vehicle became unstable at 45,000 feet and ground controllers had to terminate it as a precaution. Additional details about what went wrong were not released.

"Not the outcome any of us wanted, but we're signed up for this to be hard," Amazon chief executive Mr Bezos wrote in a blog post.

Mr Bezos founded Blue Origin to develop a vertical take-off and landing rocketship that would fly passengers to suborbital space. It recently won money from Nasa to compete to go into orbit as a space taxi now that the space shuttle fleet is retired.

The mishap occurred during a test flight last week from Blue Origin's West Texas spaceport. The ultra-secretive company notified the Federal Aviation Administration about the launch and only acknowledged the accident publicly yesterday.

The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the failure, said the test did not use government funds and was not part of the development agreement with Nasa.

Blue Origin's failure shines a spotlight on the risks of commercial space ventures.

SpaceX, which has a Nasa contract to develop a commercial vehicle to haul supplies and astronauts, suffered three rocket failures before it found success. Later this year, the company, run by PayPal founder Elon Musk, will launch a capsule on a cargo test run to the International Space Station.

Virgin Galactic, founded by the UK hedonist Richard Branson, lost three workers in 2007 after an explosion rocked a California airport during testing of a propellant system for its space tourism vehicle.

The company is currently conducting flight tests in the Mojave Desert and has not yet been able to set a potential date for the first passenger flights.

Amazon River: X-rays expose new species of Stingrays

Biologists recently fished out two new species of freshwater stingray from a river in the Amazon rainforest near Iquitos, Peru.

The animals have been put into a new genus - the first time this has been done for stingrays since 1987.

At first glance the creatures look like nothing so much as freckled pancakes with feeble tails. But X-rays revealed an elaborate skeleton in which hundreds of slivers of cartilage fan out radially to support the fish's floppy disc-shaped body.

Biologist Nathan Lovejoy of the University of Toronto, Canada, and his colleagues dubbed the new stingrays Heliotrygon gomesi and Heliotrygon rosai. The creatures, which can grow up to half a metre long, have beady eyes, suggesting that they inhabit the murky depths.

Unusually, the stingrays lack barbed tails - they are stingless - possibly because they do not have to contend with any serious predators. Like other freshwater stingrays, the new species likely hide on the bottom of the river, waiting to pounce on any prey that swims to close and swallow their meal with vacuum-like jaws.

Record-breaking current found deep in Southern Ocean

Record-breaking current found deep in Southern Ocean

MORE than 3 kilometres down in part of the freezing Southern Ocean, water is flowing at more than 700 metres per hour, making this the fastest-moving deep ocean current ever found.

The powerful current was discovered thanks to a 175-kilometre string of sensors on the eastern flank of the submerged Kerguelen plateau, some 3000 kilometres south-west of Australia (Nature Geoscience, DOI: 10.1038/ngeo842).

With a flow of more than 8 million cubic metres per second, the current transports 40 times as much water as the Amazon. It is likely to be an important component of the global ocean "conveyor belt", which pushes water from the ocean surface to its greatest depths and back again, and has a direct influence on global temperatures.

Deep ocean currents are now being monitored for signs of change. The measurements already suggest that deep Antarctic waters are warming and becoming less buoyant, perhaps because of climate change.

Quick Facts you may not know about the Amazon

Here are some quick facts about the Amazon that you may not know and can amaze your friends with.

• 1.4 billion hectares of forest


• The world's largest river basin and the source of one-fifth of all free-flowing fresh water on Earth


• 60% of the Amazon is in Brazil, in an area larger than western Europe - the rest of the Amazon spans across Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana


• One in ten known species in the world live in the Amazon Rainforest
  Threats – Soy plantation expansion, cattle ranching, unsustainable logging, human settlement


• Amazon basin is home to 21 million people of which about 30% live in rural areas and 200,000 are indigenous


• The Amazon covers approximately 50% of Brazil and stores huge amounts of carbon dioxide. Burning of forest, however, has released so much of this greenhouse gas that Brazil is now placed 4th in the world for CO2 emissions

For more information on the de-forestation of the Amazon and surrounding rainforests, click on this link to take you to Flora and Fauna International website

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.