11 July 2018Air pollution is one of the biggest threats to health worldwide. Around seven million people die as a result of pollutants every year, as the World Health Organization (WHO) has recently established in a global study. Industrial fumes and exhaust emissions from cars and other vehicles make a significant contribution to the number of deaths, as the particles penetrate deep into people’s airways, lungs and cardiovascular system. There is now a special service that can pinpoint sources of pollution precisely and analyse global pollutant distributions from space.
03 July 2018The DLR Earth Sensing Imaging Spectrometer (DESIS) – an environmental and resource monitoring system from the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) – set off for the International Space Station (ISS) at 05:42 EDT (11:42 CEST) on 29 June 2018. The Dragon capsule carrying DESIS launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The hyperspectral instrument will monitor the environment and resources on Earth. The ground segment was developed by the Earth Observation Center.
21 June 2018The TerraSAR-X satellite sent a very special greeting to mark the 150th anniversary of the Technical University of Munich (TUM).
18 June 2018As a greenhouse gas methane is 25-times more effective than CO2. Its sources include agriculture, forestry, and mining activities, livestock farming, wastewater treatment plants, and waste-disposal sites, among others. Because of its potent greenhouse effect it is particularly important to identify methane sources. EOC is participating in a large European measurement campaign to test various technologies for detecting and measuring carbon dioxide and methane sources.
15 June 2018Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica is not only one of the fastest flowing ice streams on the Southern Hemisphere. In the past eleven years huge icebergs have also broken off four times from its floating ice tongue. The reason for the abrupt retreat of the glacier front has now been clarified with the help of two EOC scientists.