Technology Trends

Thanks to a program called YourAir, thousands of people suffering from asthma and other breathing problems, and living in Central London will soon be able to be alerted of peaks of pollution by text messages sent to their cell phones. This program, which soon will be extended to other areas in London, has been developed with the help of the European Space Agency (ESA). Currently, YourAir uses air quality forecasts provided by satellites as well as information coming from local traffic roads. But it should soon incorporate more European regional data, as it becomes obvious to ESA researchers that a peak of pollution in London might have originated in the Ruhr Valley in Germany — or even in Italy. Read more…

As an example of what peaks of air pollution can look like, below is a picture showing the nitrogen dioxide concentrations over the city of London during a high-pollution event that occurred on November 15, 2000 (Credit: ESA).

But here is a better illustration, with this animation (in Macromedia Flash format).

Now, let’s get back to the YourAir service.

Around a thousand asthma sufferers and other vulnerable individuals in Croydon should soon receive text message warnings to their mobile phones before elevated air pollution days, with additional patients in other London boroughs receiving the service later on.

The YourAir service predicts levels of the pollutants nitrogen dioxide, ozone and airborne particles — exposure to which can harm people with asthma, lung and heart problems, and in the very highest concentrations can harm otherwise healthy people.

Even if current results are pretty accurate — about 90% — there are still ways for improvements, especially by incorporating other European regional data.

Regional air quality information is important because not all the pollution affecting a city actually originates there. Depending on the weather, studies show that up to half the air pollution found in some European cities might have come from elsewhere in the continent — the Ruhr in Germany for instance, or as far away as Italy’s Po Valley.

“With air pollution arising, its distribution drops off steeply away from major roads or other sources because it mixes vertically as well as horizontally,” explained Iarla Kilbane-Dawe of Cambridge Environmental Research Consultants (CERC). “On most days the air rises, taking the pollution with it — as high as 800 metres in the winter, or two kilometres in the summer. So within an hour or so of rush hour the concentrated pollution can waft away.”

The YourAir service is being developed by different organizations through ESA, and trying to find more information is like peeling an onion. It is part of the PROMOTE project, intended to deliver atmospheric information to support informed decision making in this field and improve quality of life.

And PROMOTE is itself part of the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES), a joint initiative between ESA and the European Union.

And to finish to peel the onion, where is the European Union going today? No one seems to know.

Sources: ESA news release, June 16, 2005; and various web sites

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The European Space agency (ESA) launched its Innovation Triangle Initiative in March 2004. The goal was to speed up the turnaround time from an idea to a product by creating a close collaboration between inventors and developers. Today, 27 space projects have been validated, “pioneering technology to explore other planets.” One of these projects is focused on smart new textiles, designed to be the basic building blocks of large structures to be deployed in space, such as future solar sails. Read more…

This specific project, completed in about nine months, combined the expertise in elastomers of the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge University in the UK, and the skills of two European companies, NTE in Spain, which already built large structures in space, and Grado Zero Espace in Italy for its knowledge of ‘intelligent’ textiles.

For example, below is a cooling jacket for astronauts who have to deal with high temperatures occurring during sun exposure in open space (Credit: Grado Zero Espace for its parent company, Corpo Nove). This jacket incorporates 50 meters of plastic tubing, each being 2 mm wide.

The company also designs I.O.W. (Intelligent Object to Wear), such as this motorbike jacket with its internal heating mechanism (Credit: Grado Zero Espace for its parent company, Corpo Nove).

Inside the jacket lining is a computerized microprocessor with hard disk (no bigger than a packet of cigarettes) which controls the body temperature over a series of electric heating pads.

Now, it’s time to look in details to how ’smart’ textiles can help space exploration, with some excerpts of the ESA news release.

In the future, huge ’sails’ powered by solar particles could be used to push spacecraft through space, in the same way that sails power yachts through the sea. Solar sails would have to cover an area of at least 10 000 square metres and need ultra-light and extremely large rigid structures of booms to hold them in place, a feat difficult to realise with today’s techniques.

The Italian company Grado Zero Espace came up with the idea of using an ‘intelligent’ textile to construct the extremely light and very long deployable booms that would be needed. The textile would be created by combining state-of-the-art materials and technologies such as carbon nanotubes, novel rubber-like materials named ‘nematic elastomers’ and special three-dimensional warp-knitted textile-based membranes.

Nematic elastomer composites are prepared by spreading carbon nanotubes on to a rubber matrix, with the nanotubes pre-aligned in one preferential direction. Due to this alignment of the fibres, the material’s properties are different along this direction. When an external electric field is applied, the nanotubes try to re-orient themselves and cause a change in shape of the whole rubber composite.

Finally, if you have an idea for a product which could be used in space, you still can submit a proposal to ESA’s Innovation Triangle Initiative which can provide you with seed money up to 150K euros.

Sources: ESA news release, June 16, 2005; and various web sites

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If you’re lucky enough to be a crew member of one of the next European Space Agency (ESA) long-term missions, you will have the choice between eleven new delicious recipes, such as ‘martian bread and green tomato jam’ or ‘potato and tomato mille-feuilles’ when it’s time for dinner. In ‘Ready for dinner on Mars?,’ ESA says that these recipes will use fresh ingredients grown in greenhouses built on Mars colonies or other planets. The future astronauts — should I write ‘farmonauts’? — will grow potatoes, onions, rice, soya or lettuce. And it’s interesting to note that the new menus were elaborated with the help of Alain Ducasse, the French chef who has almost as many stars in the ‘Guide Michelin’ as there are planets in our Solar system. Read more…

Below is a picture showing a ‘potato and tomato mille-feuilles,’ a recipe prepared for ESA (Credit: ADF – Alain Ducasse Formation — site in French). Here is a link to a larger version (283 KB).

The thin slices of potato, tomatoes and onion are cooked one by one, for a homogeneous colour and a melting and crispy sensation in the mouth. The basic ingredients are potatoes and tomatoes, both thought to be easy to to grow in space, on Mars or other planets.

So, what kind of vegetables will the ‘farmonauts’ be able to grow?

The menus were all based on nine main ingredients that ESA envisions could be grown in greenhouses of future colonies on Mars or other planets. These nine ingredients must comprise at least 40% of the final diet, while the remaining (up to) 60% could be additional vegetables, herbs, oil, butter, salt, pepper, sugar and other seasoning brought from Earth.

The nine basic ingredients that Christophe Lasseur, [ESA's biological life-support coordinator,] plans to grow on other planets are: rice, onions, tomatoes, soya, potatoes, lettuce, spinach, wheat and spirulina — all common ingredients except the last. Spirulina is a blue-green algae, a very rich source of nutrition with lots of protein (65% by weight), calcium, carbohydrates, lipids and various vitamins that cover essential nutritional needs for energy in extreme environments.

Besides the fact that astronauts will have better food than today, this will have additional benefits.

Today all the food for astronauts in space is brought from Earth, but this will not be possible for longer missions. Although still on the drawing board, ESA has already started research to see what could be grown on other planets — and what a self-supporting eco-system might look like on Mars.

“In addition to being healthy and sufficiently nutritious for survival, good food could potentially provide psychological support for the crew, away from Earth for years,” emphasises Lasseur.

It is extremely difficult today to be selected as an astronaut. But tomorrow, when a candidate needs to show additional qualifications in farming and in cooking, it will become almost impossible…

Anyway, for other stories about space food, you also can read two previous posts, “Eating in Space” or “Astronauts To Eat Italian-Style.”

Sources: ESA, June 13, 2005; and various sites

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The GLOBCOVER project, started by the European Space Agency (ESA), has a very simple goal. It will create the most detailed portrait of the Earth’s land surface with a resolution three times sharper than any previous satellite map. The image acquisition will be done throughout 2005 and use the Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) instrument of the Envisat environmental satellite. To create this sharp map, the GLOBCOVER project will analyze about 20 terabytes of data gathered by the European satellite. When it’s completed, the GLOBCOVER map will have numerous uses, “including plotting worldwide land use trends, studying natural and managed ecosystems and modelling climate change extent and impacts.” Read more…

Let’s start with a couple of images.

You can download larger versions of the above pictures here.

And here are some more details about the GLOBCOVER project picked from the ESA news release.

It will be a unique depiction of the face of our planet in 2005, broken down into more than 20 separate land cover classes. The completed GLOBCOVER map will have numerous uses, including plotting worldwide land use trends, studying natural and managed ecosystems and modelling climate change extent and impacts.

Envisat’s Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) instrument is being systematically used in Full Resolution Mode for the project, acquiring images with a spatial resolution of 300 metres, with an average 150 minutes of acquisitions occurring daily.

The estimate is that up to 20 terabytes of imagery will be needed to mosaic together the final worldwide GLOBCOVER map — an amount of data equivalent to the contents of 20 million books. The image acquisition strategy is based around regional climate patterns to minimise cloud or snow cover. Multiple acquisitions are planned for some regions to account for seasonal variations in land cover.

For more information about the GLOBCOVER project, please click here or there.

Sources: European Space Agency, May 5, 2005; and various websites

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Observations from several satellites launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) and other organizations have been gathered to produce the most detailed heat map of the Mediterranean. With a resolution of two square kilometers for an area of about 3 million square kilometers, an equivalent ground-based map would have needed almost 1.5 million thermometers put into the water. This ESA news release adds that sea surface temperature (SST) is an important variable for weather forecasting and for checking the rate of global warming. In fact, as water takes longer than air to warm up or cool down, the top layer of our oceans is basically acting as a reservoir of heat. Did you know that “the top two meters of ocean alone store all the equivalent energy contained in the atmosphere?” I didn’t, so read more…

Before going further, let’s look at this best-ever Mediterranean heat map.

This ultra high-resolution sea surface temperature map of the Mediterranean could only have been made with satellites. Any equivalent ground-based map would need almost a million and a half thermometers placed into the water simultaneously, one for every two square kilometres of sea.

This most detailed ever heat map of all 2 965 500 square kilometres of the Mediterranean, the world’s largest inland sea is being updated on a daily basis as part of ESA’s Medspiration project.

With sea surface temperature (SST) an important variable for weather forecasting and increasingly seen as a key indicator of climate change, the idea behind Medspiration is to combine data from multiple satellite systems to produce a robust set of sea surface data for assimilation into ocean forecasting models of the waters around Europe and also the whole of the Atlantic Ocean.

But why is this so important to precisely measure sea surface temperatures?

The temperature of the surface of the ocean is an important physical property that strongly influences the transfer of heat energy, momentum, water vapour and gases between the ocean and the atmosphere.

And because water takes a long time to warm up or cool down the sea surface functions as an enormous reservoir of heat: the top two metres of ocean alone store all the equivalent energy contained in the atmosphere.

The whole of their waters store more than a thousand times this same value — climatologists sometimes refer to the oceans as the ‘memory’ of the Earth’s climate, and measuring SST on a long-term basis is the most reliable way to establish the rate of global warming.

Please read the full ESA’s news release for more details and references, but for your viewing pleasure, here is another great picture from the Atlantic ocean taken with one of the instruments of ESA’s Envisat.

Sources: European Space Agency news release, December 15, 2004

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Environment
  
  
• ESA
  
  
• Geosciences
  
  
• Space