The Indian Ocean tsunami showed experts once and for all that the time had come to monitor approaching disasters from space. But earthquakes, forest fires, glacier slides and tidal waves can only be forecast if there are enough satellites to conduct effective research of the Earth's surface. For this reason Russia, the US, and EU, the world's space exploration leaders, are accelerating work to improve orbital systems that will allow scientists to receive information in due time on the state of the Earth's surface and the layers of the atmosphere.
This year the European Space Agency together with Italy's National Institute for Nuclear Physics and a number of the country's universities plans to launch a project to study new ways to predict earthquakes from space.
Meanwhile, Russia has proposed the establishment of a global international system to monitor the Earth's surface from space. Importantly, there is not only the science and technology to do this, but also a political basis: the interaction mechanism contained in the Kyoto protocol.
At the second nationwide conference Current Problems of Remote Sensing of the Earth From Space, held in Moscow last fall, Academician Alexander Isayev of the Russian Academy of Sciences noted that, while in the past scientists studied individual objects on Earth and its ecosystems, today attention must be focused on their global interaction. Two factors have an impact on the Earth's ecosystems: man's increased influence on the biosphere and connections between the Sun and the Earth. The academician said the Kyoto protocol also showed that we had entered an era of increased efforts to limit the consequences of the human factor and that it would be logical to adopt a similar approach to the other factors as well. The scientist continued that an important objective should be a detailed study of how ecosystems and climate interact during a warming period. "Russian scientists have been doing research of the biosphere with the help of remote sensing for the past 30 years," he said, "and have recorded significant achievements, and not only theoretical ones."
Indeed, the issue is not limited to theory alone. Developing satellites is a priority in the Federal Space Program for 2006-2015. The Russian Space Agency, Roskosmos, plans to put two satellites into orbit for the remote sensing of our planet this year and two more next year. Konstantin Kraidenko, the official spokesman for Roskosmos, says the Resurs-DK and Vulkan-Kompas will be launched in 2005 and the Meter-3M and Vulkan-Konopus will follow in 2006.
In addition, Russia's promising Vulkan system, work on which will continue throughout this and next year, will help to identity where and when a natural disaster will occur. The satellites will be put into a solar synchronous orbit with using converted military launch vehicles, Rokot and Strela, from the Plesetsk or Svobodny space center.
However, orbital equipment as part of a space monitoring system would be pointless without a ramified ground network. And Roskosmos is paying great attention to this part of the program. A year ago, the Khanty-Mansi center for receiving and transmitting information was opened in Altai. "A single center on the global level, capable of receiving and processing information from all remote sensing satellites, both Russian and foreign ones, has been established in Russia for the first time," Mr. Kraidenko said.
