 |
 |
||
 |
|
||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||||||||
 |
Planetary News: Space Policy (2007)Report Warns of Coming Crisis in Monitoring Global Change from SpaceBy Amir Alexander16 January 2007
At a time when Earth’s population is facing the likelihood of substantial climate changes, scientists will soon be left without the means to monitor the changing face of our planet from space. So says a report issued by the National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies of Science entitled “Earth Science and Applications from Space: National Imperatives for the Next Decade and Beyond.” If funding is not increased, the report warns, the number of space missions focused on monitoring Earth will decline from 29 today to 17 in 2010, and the number of space-based instruments focused on Earth will also decline by 40%. By 2020 only 5 missions will be orbiting Earth. Such a steep decline in scientists’ ability to study global changes, according to the report, can have extremely serious consequences to human life as well as social and economic life. Key questions will be left unanswered: will there be catastrophic collapse of the major ice sheets, and if so – what will be the pattern and rate of rising sea levels? Will droughts become more widespread, and will tropical storms become more frequent and more intense? How does economic development affect the emission of pollutants into Earth’s atmosphere, and how are these carried and distributed along the globe? All these questions and others like them are of urgent interest not just to scientists, but to large human populations around the world. If current levels of funding remain, the report suggests, many of them will remain unanswered. "Studying the planets is not only about looking outwards towards the heavens, it is also about looking inwards, towards the Earth" said Planetary Society board member Jim Bell of Cornell University. "Exploration of the solar system informs and educates us about our home planet," he added. "It is absolutely critical that we maintain the capability of exploring, monitoring, and studying our own planet from space, not only so that we can extend that knowledge to what we see elsewhere, but also so that we can ultimately understand and solve planetary-scale problems here at home, like global warming, deforestation, and changes in the ozone hole." The decline in the number of missions monitoring Earth from space is the result of severe cutbacks in funding for science in the NASA budget over the past two years. To reverse this trend, the report proposes funding 17 new missions to be launched over the coming decade. These will include 14 missions built and operated by NASA, two missions run by NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), and one operated jointly by the two agencies. In addition, the report also recommended that certain instruments, which had been cut from satellites currently under construction due to budgetary constraints, be restored to the missions. If the proposal is accepted, there will be 19 missions in orbit in 2010 and 17 missions in 2020. The 17 missions recommended in the report were selected from more than 100 proposals that were presented to the NRC committee. Implementing them, according to the report, would require increasing the NASA budget for Earth science space missions by half a billion dollars, bringing it to around $2 billion a year. This, along with NOAA's $1 billion budget for the same purpose, will add up to around $3 billion a year, a level that is consistent with the 2000 budget when viewed as a percentage of total U.S. economy. The report was authored by a committee of 50 leading scientists that was convened by the NRC. Chaired by Richard Anthes of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, the committee worked for two years before presenting its conclusions this week. |
||||||
 |
 |
||||||
[ what is this? ]