From Sputnik to SPOT

Swords Into Plowshares – the 25th year • Part 1
By Prof. Shimon Silman, RYAL Institute and Touro College

As we promised last year, Parshas Mishpatim, 5776, that since we are entering the 25th year of SIP (“Swords into Plowshares”) we will be running a series of articles on the latest developments in this area.

And as we have just entered the 60th year since the launch of the first satellite, Sputnik, by the Soviet Union, we will now present a two-part series* on how satellites have been transformed from the most frightful military event of its time to a technology that saves lives from natural disasters and from deadly diseases as well as making our daily lives much more convenient and peaceful.
The first Sputnik satellite was launched on October 4, 1957. Why was it the most frightful military event of its time? Well, as the pasuk says, “Ask your father and he will tell you; your elders and they will say it to you.” (D’varim 32:7) In this case however, it would probably have to be your elders—your grandparents. The U.S. had just come out of WWII where an evil empire had attempted to dominate the world. Now a new evil empire had arisen—the Soviet Union—and they were trying to do the same thing. They already had nuclear weapons and the U.S. had recently fought the Korean War against a proxy of the Soviet Union. These were the dark days of the Cold War.
Historians compare the reaction of the American public to the successful launch of Sputnik to the shock and panic that they felt after the attack on Pearl Harbor. It created the appearance of a serious technological gap between the U.S. and the Russians that had menacing implications. As Senator Lyndon B. Johnson (later to be President Johnson) put it, “I remember the profound shock of realizing that it might be possible for another nation to achieve technological superiority over this great country of ours.” One of his aides spelled it out even more clearly, saying, “The simple fact is that we can no longer consider the Russians to be behind us in technology. It took them four years to catch up to our atomic bomb and nine months to catch up to our hydrogen bomb. Now we are trying to catch up to their satellite.” Johnson is also reported to have said that soon the Russians would be dropping bombs on us like kids drop stones on passing cars going under an overpass.
Fast forward to the days of Swords into Plowshares—which is all about reduced threat perception. While there are still threats, they are more a matter of posturing rather than preparing for war. In practice, the powerful nations of the world are more interested in cooperation than conflict. A case in point is the controversy over the islands in the South China Sea, claimed by China as well as other nations. A recent Bloomberg News report analyzes this situation and explains that while there is a possibility of this leading to war, it’s unlikely because China does not want to interrupt the 5 trillion dollars in trade that passes through the area. So the threats have been reduced considerably. The U.S. and Russia now cooperate in space, most famously in the Space Station. When our space shuttle program was cancelled, we had astronauts up there in the space station, and it was the Russians who brought them back!
But there’s a lot more. In this series we will discuss how satellites, which are continually upgraded, are being used to save people’s lives from natural disasters and to stop the spread of deadly diseases. (You can’t get more peaceful than that!)
Furthermore, since this series is being published in Kislev, we will mention the famous sicha that the Rebbe MH”M said at the Chanuka Live event in 5752 (broadcast worldwide by satellites) about the real significance of satellites.
PEACEFUL USES OF SATELLITES
The peaceful uses of satellites have become so pervasive in civilian society that they are now taken for granted. We don’t even pay attention to the fact that so many aspects of our lives are guided by something in the heavens; we just assume that everything is going to work as it should.
In 2013 a BBC reporter described how the day to day life of people around the world would be affected if the satellites failed. He described a range of scenarios, ranging from the humorous, “The loss of television satellites meant that many families missed the cheery rehearsed smiles of breakfast TV presenters, and were forced to talk to each other over their cereal instead,” to the serious, “Communications, transport, power and computer systems were severely disrupted. Global business ground to a halt and governments were struggling to cope,” to the actually dangerous, “Without weather satellite data, a storm system developing rapidly over the ocean was missed and the aircraft flew straight into it…”
In this article, we will present some of the more important uses of satellites in civilian life. Here is a list of some of them; a few will be discussed in detail in the sequel.
Communication. Satellites provide in-flight phone communications on airplanes, and are often the main channel of voice communication for rural areas and areas where phone lines are damaged after a disaster. They also provide the primary timing source for cell phones and pagers. In 1998, a satellite failure—this actually happened—demonstrated this dependence. It temporarily silenced 80 percent of the pagers in the United States. Also, a national radio network (NPR) was not able to distribute its broadcasts to affiliates.
I consulted with an acquaintance of mine, Daniel Friedmann of Vancouver, BC, Canada, on various aspects of satellites. Friedmann is a satellite expert and was formerly CEO of MDA Corporation, a company that builds satellites, for 20 years. He commented that, “We are probably within 5 years of everyone on earth having access to the internet via satellite. This will allow Moshiach to communicate with every person on earth—without a miracle required!”
Satellites are also increasingly important to the developing world. For a country like India, with populations separated by rough terrain and different languages, communications satellites provide remote populations access to education and to medical expertise that would otherwise not reach them.
Navigation. Satellite based navigation systems, like the Navstar Global Positioning Systems (GPS), enable anyone with a handheld receiver to determine their location to within a few meters. GPS locators are increasingly included in in-car direction services and allow car-share services to locate their cars. GPS based systems are used for navigation on land, sea, and air, and are crucial in situations like a ship or an airplane making a difficult course in bad weather.
Weather and Environment. Satellites provide meteorologists with the ability to see weather on a global scale, allowing them to follow the development of large systems like hurricanes and the effects of phenomena like volcanic eruptions and burning gas and oil fields.
They are also some of the best sources of data for climate research. Satellites monitor ocean temperatures and prevailing currents. Imaging satellites can measure the changing sizes of glaciers, which is difficult to do from the ground due to the remoteness and darkness of the Polar Regions and they can determine long term patterns of rainfall and vegetation cover etc.
Search and Rescue. Earth observation satellites can monitor ocean and wind currents as well as the extent of forest fires, oil spills, and airborne pollution. Together, this information helps organize emergency responders and environmental cleanup. In search and rescue missions, satellites can search for people in distress in remote regions. Distress radio signals directly linked to a search and rescue satellite can lead rescuers quickly and accurately to a land, sea, or air emergency location.
Stop the Spread of Disease. By tracking “vector borne diseases” and warning in advance where the next outbreak is likely to occur. This will be discussed at length in Part 2 of this series.
Earth Resources. Satellites can detect underground water and mineral sources, monitor the transfer of nutrients and contaminants from land into waterways, and measure land and water temperatures, the growth of algae in seas, and the erosion of topsoil from land. They can efficiently monitor large-scale infrastructure, for example fuel pipelines that need to be checked for leaks, which would require enormous hours of land or air-based inspection. Imaging satellites produce high resolution data of almost the entire landmass on earth; such data used to be a closely guarded military capability, but now, nearly anyone with an internet connection can find his house using Google Earth. Earth observation satellites also allow developing countries to practice informed resource management and relief agencies to follow refugee population migrations.
Satellite Upgrades
We now begin a detailed discussion of how satellites are being used today for peaceful purposes. Our starting point will be the famous lecture of Dr. Naftali Berg z”l at the 1993 Moshiach and Science Conference of the RYAL Institute. He spoke about how satellites are now being used to locate and identify land that is suitable for agriculture and to find resources deep beneath the surface of the earth which can’t be located by conventional means. He discussed the Landsat, Land TM and ERS1 satellites specifically.
The Landsat 7 satellite, a much more technologically-advanced version of the Landsat satellite discussed by Dr. Berg, was launched on April 15, 1999. Landsat 7’s sensor has been called “the most stable, best characterized Earth observation instrument ever placed in orbit.” The Landsat satellite program drew on technologies developed under U.S. military reconnaissance satellite programs like Corona. Commercial high-resolution systems currently prepared by US consortia are essentially civilian copies of earlier U.S. military systems, usually developed by the same companies that developed the military systems.
On February 11, 2013, Landsat 8 was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California.
Landsat 8 was a collaboration between NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). NASA led the design, construction, launch, and initial calibration of the satellite. (They called it the Landsat Data Continuity Mission.) On May 30, 2013, USGS took over operation of the satellite and it became known as Landsat 8.
The satellite travels in a polar orbit, passing over the north and south poles about every 100 minutes capturing images on the sunlit side of the earth every time it passes over. It makes about 14 orbits of the earth each day, covering the entire earth every 16 days.
Landsat 8 has two imaging instruments covering different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum:
Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS). This instrument monitors infrared wavelengths (heat); it records temperatures of points on the earth as it passes over.
Operational Land Imager (OLI). This instrument monitors visible light and shortwave infrared wavelengths that are close to visible light so it actually photographs points on the surface of the earth as it passes over.
Previous Landsat satellites used several “whisk-broom sensors” that quickly moved back and forth scanning a location on the earth. The major technological innovation of Landsat 8 is its “push-broom sensors”—thousands of stationary sensors that can focus on and photograph individual picture elements (pixels) on the earth’s surface as it passes over.
The images Landsat records are sent to the Earth Resources Observation and Science center (EROS) and are available to everyone at no cost.
SPOT AND OTHER SATELLITES
SPOT is the French version of Landsat, developed by the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES), the French space agency. SPOT is an acronym for the French Satellites Pour l’Observation de la Terra (satellites for the observation of the earth).
Between 1986 and 2002, five SPOT satellites were launched which subsequently delivered excellent imagery of the earth for applications similar to those of Landsat, including mapping, vegetation monitoring, land use and land cover, and the impacts of natural disasters as well as oil and mineral exploration, water resources, and environmental monitoring.
It was the first European Earth-observation satellite program and some of the SPOT satellites had technical advantages over the Landsat satellites.
In 2015 CNES took SPOT 5 out of orbit, ending its involvement in the SPOT program. But it was picked up by Airbus, a private company, which had already launched SPOT 6 in 2012 and SPOT 7 in 2014. All the data and images from SPOT 1 through SPOT 5 are available at no cost to anyone for non-commercial purposes.
In December 2014, SPOT 7 was sold to Azerbaijan’s space agency, Azercosmos, which renamed it Azersky. (How about that! From Sputnik to SPOT, then SPOT goes back to Azerbaijan, a country from the former Soviet Union.)
SPOT 6 and SPOT 7 are expected to continue to provide high resolution data until 2024.
We have emphasized Landsat and SPOT because we have been following them since the 1990s but now there are a lot of satellites doing similar things, some from non-governmental corporations. We mention especially the widely used DigitalGlobe satellites and the Radarsat satellites of the Canadian Space Agency. There are also many Israeli and Japanese satellites.
לזכות רחל בת שרה לאה תי’ לרפואה שלימה ולאריכות ימים ושנים טובות*