A couple of career life-times ago, I was a “remote sensing analyst.” I worked with satellite imagery to identify, analyzes and map activities on the earth’s surface. Never in all those years, nor from my admittedly infrequent observations of developments in my previous craft, did I ever hear anyone express a scientific need for a satellite that would provide a 24-hour-a-day, full-hemispheric view of the earth. Nor did I ever know anyone to consider a midnight brainstorm with nothing more behind it than a dream and “20 minutes of research on the Internet” grounds for a new program.
Al Gore’s midnight inspiration for a $20-50 million solar-synchronous webcam undoubtedly came from the same place as the inspiration for his vacuous tobacco-killed-my-sister speech at the Democrat convention.
Let’s do a little bit of back-of-the-envelope math before we push the launch button:
Gore’s satellite would have a five-mile resolution. That means that the smallest unit of resolution in the image would correspond to an area on the ground of 25 square miles (5 miles x 5 miles). Everything within that “pixel’s” area would be averaged to one single color. Most major U.S. cities would merit 3-10 pixels to represent their full extent — out of the total 2.5 million pixels required to capture the entire disk.
As a point of reference, the fires currently raging in the Amazon Basin because of the El Nino-induced drought have consumed 22,000-square miles of forest land. This corresponds to an area of 148 miles square, or on GoreSat an area of 30 x 30 pixels. This area is too small to be readily discerned when viewing the full image and, if enlarged, its resolution too crude to provide meaningful data for scientists or even news outlets wanting to illustrate their stories.
It gets worse. At a resolution of five miles, the 8,000 mile diameter of the earth will require a computer monitor that can display 1600 x 1600 pixels (i.e. 8000 miles/5 miles per pixel) — considerably finer than the maximum 1280 x 1024 pixels I have available on my system. There are only two ways to resolve this problem – truncate the area viewed or re-size the image to fit most users’ screen capabilities. At my current 800 x 600 screen setup, the effective resolution of a
full-hemispheric view of the earth would be over 13 miles. Each pixel would correspond to 177 square miles on the ground. Utterly worthless.
OK, we’ve done dumb — let’s do dumber.
One might attempt to make the case that having a 24-hour-a-day view compensates for GoreSat’s poor spatial resolution — particularly if we’re monitoring global-scale phenomena like weather systems. A couple of problems: Rather than sitting in a stationary geosynchronous orbit where passing storms can be tracked across the screen, GoreSat “moves with the sun.” It is a moving platform from which Gore proposes monitoring moving phenomena — not unlike watching grass grow from a moving car.
Further, the proposed system offers three spectral channels — most likely the standard RGB channels needed to give a natural color representation of whatever is imaged. Because of the obscuring effect of earth atmospherics, these are not the optimal spectral parameters for monitoring surface features. There are good reasons we put the Hubbell telescope in space.
Next consideration — unless Americans are going to web surf on the job, most of us will not be checking GoreSat until sometime after 8:00 p.m. The satellite will then be centered over the Pacific Ocean. Boring! And with the sun bearing straight down on the ocean surface from behind the satellite, I would predict a giant, white spot of sun-glint sitting right in the middle of the picture. Is this what American taxpayers get for their $20-50 million?
Vice President Gore has even suggested a name for this boondoggle, “Triana” — the lookout on Columbus’ ship who first sighted the New World. If we must pour our dollars down this rat hole, at least let’s get the name right. I suggest we call the GoreSat webcam “Fleet” — for Frederick Fleet who was manning the lookout nest on the Titanic the evening of April 14, 1912. We know how that one turned out.
It is telling that the generally comatose Gore gets so excited over such a patently dumb idea — the cosmic equivalent of going down to the Laundromat and watching clothes spin around in the dryer. Frankly, I’d prefer to see a webcam in the Oval Office.
I have posted a copy of the famous Apollo 17 image of the earth at http://www.jps.net/aslan/GoreSat. It has been enlarged to the 1600 x 1600 pixel image size required by Gore’s parameters (although his picture will be clearer than this one). I have also marked off a 30 x 30 pixel area in red
corresponding to the area consumed to date by fires in the Amazon. Warning — the image is 1.2 megabytes in size and will take a long time to download. Didn’t Al tell you that?
Jay Baggett is a political consultant in Sacramento, Calif. His e-mail address is [email protected].
