CAP Squadron 80 Aerospace Education

This site is intended as a log of Aerospace Education activity in the Civil Air Patrol,
California Wing, San Jose Senior Squadron 80. As such, it will probably be of limited
interest to anyone outside of that organization (and even to many within it), but feel
free to poke around anyway.

We apologize in advance for the utter lack of salacious content. But since there is no shortage
of other sites that will be happy to cater to that need, we won't be losing any sleep over it.

Showing posts with label satellite. Show all posts

12 December 2016

Presentation: December 2016

This month's AE presenter: David

Date of presentation: 12-Dec-2016

Subject: The GOES Satellite Program

Description: David discussed the Geostationary Orbital Environmental Satellite (GOES) program. This program started in 1975 to provide geostationary satellites for weather forecasting. There are two satellites active at any given time, GOES East and GOES West, with an online, or in-orbit, spare. This gives complete coverage of the Western Hemisphere to image clouds in the visible and infrared spectrums, and provide soundings to determine the amount of water vapor, cloud heights, and ozone layer. Current satellites also monitor solar weather. The satellites have the ability to receive and retransmit signals from the earth, and even have been used as communications satellites for Antarctic research stations. GOES satellites also used by the AFRCC to listen for ELTs.

11 June 2014

Aerospace Minute by David

On 2 June, David talked about competition in the market of commercial satellite imagery. Digital Globe currently sells images with a resolution of 50 cm, or about 20 inches. Airbus is selling images with better resolution. They have petitioned for permission to sell images with better resolution and are launching a satellite in August capable of images with 31 cm , or 12 inch resolution. Another challenge for Digital Globe is Skybox. Skybox is a startup that plans to launch 24 low cost, low resolution satellites in low orbit, each satellite about the size of a dorm room refrigerator. Through the use of scale out compute clusters and technologies such as Hadoop Map-Reduce, they are able to create high resolution images by stacking multiple low resolution images. This is a similar technique to stacking photos for astro-photography. It is rumored that Google is eyeing skybox for purchase, we could soon have Google Satellites.