Satellites Archives

This item was updated at 4:22 pm, Aug. 20, to reflect a reply from Microsoft.

Or, based on this sole-source contract announcement from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, Google now owns, at the least, visualization of the planet.

NGA says it needs a secure system that will provide Web-based access to geospatial visualization services and Open Geospatial Consortium compliant Web-service interfaces. It says only Google can do the job.

"Google is the only source that can meet the government's requirement for worldwide access, unlimited processing and Open Geospatial Consortium compliant Web service interfaces," said NGA, which plans to award the company a two-year contract, with two one-year options.

NGA did not detail the value of the Google deal, but I have a hunch it's big bucks.

I've asked Microsoft what its Bing folks think of this, but have not heard back.

Update: Micorosft spokesman Keith Hodson said the company's Bing Maps Server can meet the NGA's requirements.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., floated what he considers a nifty idea to finance a nationwide public safety broadband network at a hearing on Thursday of the Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet: auction off a mess of spectrum to raise the billions of dollars need to finance the building and operating of the broadband network.

But part of the spectrum Waxman wants to sell -- the 1675-1710 Megahertz band -- supports operation of systems equal in importance to cop and fire comms, the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to help forecast the weather and track oil slicks in the Gulf of Mexico.

Last time I checked it was real hard to retune the frequency of a satellite 22,000 miles in space.

Japan, which provided the world with its first robotic dog in 1999, has now turned on the world's first tweeting satellite. The tweety bird is a four-inch square, 2.2 pound CubeSat from Intelligent Space Systems Laboratory at the University of Tokyo.

The satellite, CubeSat XI-V, was launched in October 2005, and started sending out its tweets on April 30. These sat-tweets are in Kanji characters and provide operational details on the satellite.

CubeSats have been developed and operated primarily by universities, but now the Air Force has decided to develop its own minisatellites. The Air Force Space Command says it plans to issue a procurement for two CubeSats this June.

I hope they have built in Twitter capacity so they can send tweets to Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and an unabashed Twitter fan.

About 7 million airline passengers had been going nowhere slowly due to the volcanic ash plume from a volcano in Iceland that has all but closed air traffic in Europe since April 14.

But if those travelers have a Wi-Fi laptop computer and are stuck in an airport that offers wireless service, they are probably better informed than folks stuck on the Washington Beltway - all of whom, we know, keep their eyes on the road.

You can get The Big Picture from Radar Virtuel, which offers a nifty map of Europe that shows flights in real time -- with an ash cloud overlay.

The site graphically depicts what everyone who reads, watches or listens to the news knows: Northern Europe has less air traffic since the 1880s when Santos Dumont flew his airship around the Eiffel Tower.

You can get The Bigger Picture from NASA, which offers a variety of satellite shots of the plume and the Eyjafjallajökull cauldron from April 17 through Monday.

At no extra charge, NASA also throws in how to pronounce the name of the volcano: EYE-a-fyat-la-yu-goot. The Associated Press tells us it's "ay-yah-FYAH'-plah-yer-kuh-duhl." (Listen to this pronunciation and you decide.)

In any case, don't practice it while driving on the Beltway.

You can get Just The Facts from Eurocontrol, which coordinates air traffic control across the continent and offers four daily updates on how much European airspace is closed due to the volcanic ash cloud.

One of the latest updates shows air traffic control services are not being provided to civilian aircraft in the major part of European airspace. This includes Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, northern Italy, Romania, Slovenia, Switzerland, parts of Ukraine and the United Kingdom.

Eurocontrol also provides a map of the ash cloud that shows it's not moving very far or very fast.

You can get your Bad Mozzarella Report from Bradley Klapper of the Associated Press, who did a great roundup of the economic impacts resulting from the near shutdown of European air traffic. He hit the high points such as the fact that air carriers are losing $200 million a day, but also took a look at other fallouts from the cloud. This includes hotels gouging stranded travelers $800 a night and Italian farmers facing losses of $14 million a day as mozzarella and fresh fruits risk going bad as they sit on tarmacs.

I'm obsessed with GPS, which I consider a Defense Department invention and gift to the world equal to the Internet. Today the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio, inducted the man who invented the basic technology behind the system now used for applications ranging from aircraft navigation to precision farming.

GPS allows folks to determine their location anywhere on earth by using a receiver which calculates the time it takes to receive signals from at least three of the 24 GPS satellites orbiting the earth.

In 1964, Roger Easton, a scientist at the Naval Research Laboratory, hatched the basic idea behind GPS -- fly atomic clocks in a constellation of satellites around earth in a racetrack orbit to provide precise location information. He called the concept TIMATION, short for time-navigation.

NRL launched the first TIMATION satellite in 1967, followed by three others between 1969 and 1977, which proved Easton's concept. The Air Force launched the first experimental GPS satellite in 1978.

If anyone doubts the value of basic research, Easton's work definitely has proven monetary value. The GPS market worldwide is expected to be worth $70 billion in gadgets, software and services by 2013.

But, despite the precision of GPS -- which today can pinpoint location within feet -- it's still a good idea pack a map and a compass when you go for a hike in the woods with your GPS-equipped cell phone.

This contract award notice was posted on FedBizOpps on Feb. 19, detailing the cost of the gear needed to receive DirectTV on three DC-9 jets operated by the 932nd Aircraft Wing at Scott Air Force Base, Ill., for "Distinguished Visitor" (that would be congressional folks and other pooh-bahs).

The award -- to Rockwell Collins, which had a similar contract last year -- is for supplying DirectTV service to the aircraft, including the Continental Europe and Mideast packages.

Rockwell won the contract with a 20 percent discount for the TV service, but the contract said the cost of the receiving gear per aircraft will be $631,353. That rounds out to almost $1.9 million for three DC-9s the 932nd uses to haul pooh-bahs around in style.

Yeah, I know bolting a DirectTV dish onto a DC-9 is a more complex endeavor than lashing one onto the roof of my house, but I wonder whether the Air Force should have considered the Dish Network option.

I bet the Dish Network would even throw in some DVRs into its package.

It's amazing what I can find trolling through thousands of pages of budget documents. Like this one: the location of a highly sensitive system.

Be warned that in the era of plain old Google and Google Earth any small hint of a system's location will lead any reasonably good searchmeister right to it.

I did that on Wednesday when an agency I will leave unnamed put the building number in its fiscal 2011 budget documents where it planned to install an unbelievably sensitive system. It did not include the city or street name.

I fired up Google, typed in the name of the agency and the building number, and in less than a minute had the name of the installation where the building was located, the city, the street number and the zip code. I then cranked all that information into Google Earth, fiddled around for a couple of minutes, and was then looking into that building's front door.

This is open source intelligence, and if I could find the building, so, I imagine, can any number of bad guys. I'm not disclosing the name of the agency, building or system, but I did send them a note about what I considered a rather serious OPSEC flub.

I'm really sensitive to this kind of stuff. In 1998, while on assignment for Federal Computer Week in Bosnia, I was captured by a U.S. Army rifle platoon after a seemingly innocent trip to a remote hilltop to do a telemedicine story.

Army Lt. Col. Jim Cronin, the public affairs officer in Tuzla, Bosnia, at the time, told me I could take all the photos I wanted, and so I snapped merrily away, including many shots of some really weird radio antennas.

Turns out that the weird antennas belonged to, shh, an outfit headquartered at Fort Meade, Md. As a result, the Army dispatched four Humvees to capture me.

Oh yeah, they wanted the film, which I did not give them. (Nowadays, I don't need my own film, just Google Earth.)

Cronin tried to explain it all away by telling me "we had a slow peacekeeping day."

The U.S.. Strategic Command oversees a lot of operations and assets, including the country's nuclear strike force, missile defense, satellites and cyberspace operations. But the STRATCOM commander views a midspace collision of two satellites this February as the "seminal event" of the year.

So what? Space is a big place, right? Not according to STRACOM commander Air Force Gen. Kevin Chilton, who said in a speech he delivered Wednesday that the portion of space near earth is crowded, home to some 800 satellites and about 20,000 pieces of space junk.

The February collision of a commercial Iridium communications satellite and a nonoperational Russian Cosmos military satellite created another 600 pieces of space junk and served as a wakeup call to STRATCOM to develop better ways to track stuff in orbit -- or what Chilton called space situational awareness.

The Secure World Foundation, a nonprofit in a Superior, Colo., that advocates development of an advanced space situational awareness system, estimates the amount of space junk is 15 times greater than what Chilton said. The group believes) that there are about 300,000 untracked objects in Earth's orbit, including such things as foil scraps, bolts and other material. The number of bits and pieces smaller than three feet may number in the billions, the foundation estimated.

Chilton said the United States is "decades behind where we should be," in development of a space sitiuational awareness system and added the development of such a system is a global challenge that might require a global partnership to solve.

Litter - it's everywhere, even in orbit.

Want some outrage today?

Take out your pay stub, look at the gaping hole the Internal Revenue Service has made in your income and then read this Government Accountability Office testimony. It details how contractors have managed to defang the Defense Contract Audit Agency, the outfit that's supposed to protect the public purse from looters called federal contractors.

Gregory Kutz, managing director of forensic audits and special investigations at GAO, told a hearing of the Defense acquisition reform panel of the House Armed Services Committee on Thursday that slipshod auditing practices -- and what seems like a "Stockholm Syndrome" relationship between Defense auditors and contractors -- has resulted in billions of dollars in taxpayer money being subject to fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement.

In one egregious example Kutz cites, a DCAA manager auditing a satellite launch proposal from an unnamed major U.S. defense contractor got pressure from the contractor and the buying command to drop some unflattering findings. The manager directed his auditors to omit the bad results, and DCAA issued a more favorable opinion, which allowed the company to win a contract that improperly compensated it for $271 million in commercial business losses.

Kutz added that the Defense inspector general has launched a criminal investigation of the smelly deal.

Shay Assad, acting deputy undersecretary of Defense for acquisition and technology, tried to explain to the committee that DCAA is just one of many players in a complex decision making process.

He told the hearing, "Occasionally there are differences of opinion between the DCAA auditor and the contracting officer on audit findings. That is to be expected as DCAA is accounting oriented, while the contracting officer is business oriented, and must balance many factors and considers input from many technical advisors, including DCAA, in his decision-making process."

Unfortunately, as Kutz pointed out, that process seems to favor the contractor rather than taxpayers who don't have a rocket business in their backyards.

Over the past decade federal agencies have been able to buy commercial satellite communication services through either General Services Administration contracts or those managed by the Defense Information Systems Agency.

But those contracts will expire in 2012 and Bob Lesion, a GSA spokesman, told me that DISA and GSA have agreed on a joint strategy to replace them.

What is the joint strategy? Well, we'll all have to wait until next Thursday, when the two agencies will detail their plans in a conference call, which will include details on future solicitations.

What next. - perhaps joint cloud computing efforts between GSA and DISA?