In disasters like the 7.8 magnitude earthquake and 7.5-magnitude aftershock that struck Syria and Turkey on February 6, 2023, international cooperation on satellite imaging plays a crucial role in the rescue and recovery efforts.

Such data enables humanitarian aid to better deliver water and food by mapping the condition of roads, bridges, buildings, and – most crucially – identifying populations trying to escape potential aftershocks by gathering in stadiums or other open spaces.

To quickly turn the eyes of satellites toward the affected areas, the Turkish Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD) requested the activation of the international charter on “Space and Major Disasters” at 7:04 a.m. local time. The United Nations did so for Syria at 11:29 local time.

In the meantime, 11 space agencies got ready to operate the most appropriate optical and radar satellites. For France, these are the optical satellites Spot, Pléaides and Pléiades Neo (medium, high and very high resolution), which will provide the first images as they pass over the area. Radar satellites will complement the optical information, as they also operate at night and through clouds, and can image landslides and even very small changes in altitude.

Every year, millions of people around the world are affected by disasters, whether natural (cyclone, tornado, typhoon, earthquake, landslide, volcanic eruption, tsunami, flood, forest fire, etc.) or man-made (oil pollution, industrial explosions, and more). Unfortunately, the intensity and frequency of these disasters are increasing with climate change, creating more and more victims, damaged homes, and devastated landscapes.

Anatomy of a disaster

The international charter on “Space and Major Disasters” defines a disaster as a large-scale, sudden, unique and uncontrolled event, resulting in loss of life or damage to property and the environment, and requiring urgent action to acquire and provide data.

The charter was created by the National Space Research Centre and the European Space Agency in 1999, soon joined by the Canadian Space Agency. Today, 17 member space agencies have joined forces to provide free satellite imagery as quickly as possible over the disaster area. Since 2000, the charter has been activated 797 times in more than 154 countries. It has since been complemented by similar initiatives from Europe (Copernicus Emergency) and Asia (Sentinel Asia).

Almost three quarters of the activations of the charter are due to weather phenomena: storms, hurricanes and especially floods, which alone account for half of the activations. In these sometimes unforeseen crisis situations, when the ground is damaged or flooded and roads are impassable, land-based resources are not always able to analyse the extent of the disaster and organise relief and humanitarian aid in the best possible way. By capturing the situation from space, with very high resolution, satellites provide crucial information quickly.

In some cases, the charter cannot be activated. This can be because the subject matter is outside the scope of the charter (wars and armed conflicts) or because space imagery is sometimes of little interest (in the case of heat waves and epidemics), or because the phenomenon evolves slowly and over a long time span (droughts).

Satellite data in response to crises around the world

As soon as a disaster occurs, satellites are programmed to quickly acquire images over the affected areas. More than 60 satellites, optical or radar, can be mobilised at any given time.

Depending on the type of disaster, different satellites will be mobilised, based on pre-established crisis plans – among them: TerraSAR-X/Tandem-X, QuickBird-2, Radarsat, Landsat-7/8, SPOT, Pleiades, Sentinel-2 among others.

Optical images are similar to photos seen from space, but radar images can be more difficult to interpret by non-experts. So following the disaster, satellite information is reworked to make it easier to understand. For example, the images are transformed into impact or change maps for rescue workers, flood alert maps for the public, and mapping of burnt or flooded areas with damage estimates for decision-makers.

Collaborative work between field users and satellite operators is essential. Progress has been made thanks to innovations in Earth observation technologies (notably the performance of optical resolutions – from 50 to 20 metres and now 30 centimetres) and 3D data processing software, but also thanks to the development of digital tools that can couple satellite and in situ data. The needs of the field have also contributed to the evolution of the charter’s intervention processes in terms of delivery time and quality of the products delivered.

Reconstruction after disasters

Emergency management is of course essential, but it is equally vital for all affected countries to consider reconstruction and the future. Indeed, the “risk cycle” posits that reconstruction, resilience and risk prevention all play an important role in the return to normality. While disasters cannot be predicted, they can be better prepared for, especially in countries where they are recurrent. For example, residents could benefit from earthquake-resistant construction, the creation of safe gathering places or relocating to living areas to safe locations. Learning survival skills is also crucial.

Several initiatives, called “reconstruction observatories”, have been carried out after major disasters – two examples are Haiti in 2021 and in Beirut after the 2019 port explosion. The aim is to coordinate satellite images to enable a detailed and dynamic assessment of damage to buildings, roads, farms, forests and more in the most affected areas, to monitor reconstruction planning, to reduce risks and to monitor changes over a three- to four-year time horizon.

Emilie Bronner, Représentante CNES au Secrétariat Exécutif de la Charte Internationale Espace et Catastrophes Majeures, Centre national d’études spatiales (CNES)

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

I’m senior correspondent Golnaz Esfandiari. Here’s what I’ve been following and what I’m watching out for in the days ahead.

The Big Issue

( RFE/RL ) – Russia successfully launched an Iranian satellite into space on August 9, in a move that has raised concerns in the West. U.S. officials fear that the satellite could be used by Moscow to boost its intelligence capabilities in Ukraine, which it invaded in February. There are also worries that the satellite will provide Iran “unprecedented capabilities” to monitor potential military targets in Israel, its archenemy, and other countries in the wider Middle East region.

Tehran has rejected those claims, saying Iran will have full control and operation over the satellite “from day one.” Iran has said the remote-sensing satellite will only be used for civilian purposes, including monitoring border areas, surveying water resources, and managing natural disasters.

Why It Matters: The satellite launch is the latest sign of the deepening ties between Iran and Russia. It came just weeks after Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Tehran, where he and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei pledged to work together against the West.

Both countries have been hit by Western sanctions and international isolation. Yuri Borisov, head of Russia’s state space corporation Roskosmos, hailed the launch as an “important landmark” in cooperation between Moscow and Tehran. Iran’s Telecommunications Minister Issa Zarepour, who attended the launch in Kazakhstan, praised it as “historic” and “a turning point” in space cooperation between the countries.

The satellite launch has also put a spotlight on Iran’s space program. In recent years, Tehran has launched several satellites into low Earth orbit and announced plans to send astronauts into space. But Iran has also seen a succession of accidents and failed satellite launches in recent years.

John Krzyzaniak, a research analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said in June that Iranian satellites do not have advanced capabilities, but they represent “stepping stones to more sophisticated satellites that will be more useful and remain in orbit for longer periods.”

What’s Next: Russia’s successful launch of the Khayyam satellite, named after the 11th-century Persian poet and philosopher Omar Khayyam, could worsen tensions with the United States. Just last month, Washington claimed that Tehran was preparing to deliver hundreds of combat drones to Russia for use in the war in Ukraine.

“Russia deepening an alliance with Iran is something that the whole world should look at and see as a profound threat,” a State Department spokesperson was quoted as saying on August 9.

The United States has long expressed concerns over Iran’s space program, which has both a civilian and military component. The United States fears that Tehran could use the program to enhance its ballistic-missile capabilities.

Via RFE/RL

Copyright (c)2020 RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036.

A cosmic airburst is caused by a meteor exploding in the air before it strikes the earth. The most famous such event occurred in 1908 over Tunguska in eastern Siberia, burning trees in a five-mile radius and knocking down those beyond it.

The archeologists found that the sediment and the artifacts within it had been burned at temperatures as high as 4,500 degrees F., destroying buildings including a palace, and discovered human skeletons that appear to have been blasted apart.

The airburst occurred in the saline Dead Sea region, where the water is so salty you can’t sink. I’ve been swimming in the Dead Sea, and people cover themselves with mud so that they don’t get horribly sunburned from floating at the surface. The explosion would have evaporated some of the sea and the detonation drew salt from it and from the surrounding salt desert up to itself, then scattered the salt widely. They write, “anomalously high salt content in the debris matrix is consistent with an aerial detonation above high-salinity sediments near the Jordan River or above the hypersaline Dead Sea. This event, in turn, distributed salt across the region, severely limiting regional agricultural development for up to ~ 600 years.”

Thus, not only did the airburst obliterate the town at the site of Tell el-Hammam, it wiped out Jericho and other Canaanite cities in the area, and sowed salt into their soil so thoroughly that they were not inhabited for the subsequent three to seven hundred years. Population in this region fell from some 60,000 to a few hundred hunters and gatherers and stayed that way for centuries. As a lay person I wonder if this long term depopulation accounts for the tiny population in Jerusalem from the 1600s through about 1000 BC, when there were as few as 500 people living there. If David existed and was in Jerusalem (who knows?), he clearly was a village headman in a minor place with some roughhewn stone fortifications rather than a magnificent emperor with a shining palace.

The authors of the paper go on tentatively to suggest that the airburst could have become a folk memory, passed down in tales from generation to generation for a millennium as so was incorporated by the scribes in Achaemenid Babylon into the Genesis story of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Personally, I don’t approve of this sort of “biblical archeology.” Apocalyptic poets and sages were perfectly capable of imagining the wrath of the gods falling on a human city with cosmic ferocity without needing the actual example of a astronomical event like a meteor fall to inspire them. Many biblical materials go back to ancient Levantine religion of a thousand or two thousand years before the Tell el-Hammam airburst, visible in the Ugaritic tablets of ancient greater Syria.

Still, you can’t rule out that such a huge event could have left a long-term mark on the local Canaanite culture from which the Israelis emerged.

Genesis 19:1-5 says,

The two angels came to Sodom in the evening, and Lot was sitting in the gateway of Sodom. When Lot saw them, he rose to meet them, and bowed down with his face to the ground. 2 He said, “Please, my lords, turn aside to your servant’s house and spend the night, and wash your feet; then you can rise early and go on your way.” They said, “No; we will spend the night in the square.” 3 But he urged them strongly; so they turned aside to him and entered his house; and he made them a feast, and baked unleavened bread, and they ate. 4 But before they lay down, the men of the city, the men of Sodom, both young and old, all the people to the last man, surrounded the house; 5 and they called to Lot, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, so that we may know them.”

Lot offered them his daughters to rape instead of allowing the mob to rape his divine male visitors, but they would not be mollified. The angels advised Lot and his family to flee the coming consequent wrath of the Lord. Gen 19:24-26 says,

24 Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the Lord out of heaven; 25 and he overthrew those cities, and all the Plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground. 26 But Lot’s wife, behind him, looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.

These passages became the basis for Jewish and Christian condemnations of gay people as wicked much later, in the medieval period, though the sin of the people of Sodom was not homosocial pleasure but rather the threat of male on male gang rape. That is, it was about sex as illicit power, applied to a guest. In societies marked by practices of reciprocity, disrespecting a guest is the worst thing you can do. Such societies are typically characterized by scarcity, so people are amazing generous when they have enough to share, in hopes that when thing turn down for them, others will reciprocate with their own generosity.

The Qur’an retells Gen 19 in a set of midrashes or interpretive reimaginings. One of these, The Spider 29:26-35, goes this way:

²⁶Lot believed in Him, saying, “I am setting out to my Lord. He is the All-Glorious, the All-Wise.”

²⁷We bestowed upon him Isaac and Jacob and established in his lineage a tradition of prophesying and delivering scripture. We gave him his compensation in this world, and he is among the righteous in the next.

²⁸Lot said to his people, “You commit sexual improprieties to a degree that is unprecedented among all the peoples of the world. ²⁹You approach men, and block the way, and commit immorality in your gatherings.”

The story ends as in Genesis:

³³When Our emissaries came to Lot, he was distressed for them, since he could not protect them.

They said, “Have no fear, and do not be sad. We will deliver you and your family, except for your wife, who lags behind. ³⁴We are raining down desolation on this city from the sky in retribution for their debauchery.”

³⁵We left behind a clear sign from it for a people endued with reason.

Muslim clerics again misinterpreted this passage as a condemnation of homosexuality, when it is clearly slamming instead the predations of the people of Sodom, who sexually preyed upon and raped male strangers who came to their town.

If Bunch and Malcolm et al. are right, then a cosmic event, the airburst of a meteor, became an occasion for millennia of puritan preaching depicting the catastrophe as the result of human moral failings. In turn, they specified the supreme moral failing as sexual predation on guests.

And then subsequent millennia of clerics and religious authorities misinterpreted the scriptural story as a condemnation of homosexuality. So in this telling, a superstitious approach to a scientific even produced a superstitious approach to morality that eventuated in homophobia.

Me, I think the reality is likely a good deal more complicated and less positivistic, and that no meteors were needed for the bigoted to impose heteronormativity on society.

For more of my modern readings of the Qur’an, the scripture of Islam, see my recent book,

Purchase

For people who would like to learn more about Islam, The Conversation is publishing a series of articles, available on our website or as six emails delivered every other day, written by Senior Religion and Ethics Editor Kalpana Jain. Over the past few years she has commissioned dozens of articles on Islam written by academics. These articles draw from that archive and have been checked for accuracy by religion scholars.

In the previous installment of this series, you learned about the different Muslim sects and the interesting ways they mix in the United States. This article will take you through the historical contributions of Islam and its influence on other faiths across geographical regions.

Your understanding of Islam is perhaps incomplete without a deeper appreciation of its cultural and intellectual history. History books in the U.S. can give an incomplete picture about the richness of its past, so many students may fail to appreciate the importance of this history.

Islamic scholars contributed to early developments in astronomy, medicine and mathematics. Their work was crucial to Renaissance scientists who built on some of the existing scholarship.

For example, the 11th-century astronomer al-Qabisi, one in a line of famous Islamic astronomers, helped formulate a critique of the then-prevalent notion that the Earth was at the center of the universe. As scholar of Middle Eastern studies Stephennie Mulder writes, that model later informed the view of Nicholas Copernicus, a Renaissance astronomer.

Important works of mathematics were written by Islamic scholars, including substantial contributions to algebra and a commentary on the fourth-century B.C. Greek mathematician Euclid that was later translated into Latin. An early description of surgery to remove cataracts was written by Islamic ophthalmologists in the year 1010.

Many of these scholars were based in Mosul in modern-day Iraq, a city that was occupied by the Islamic State from 2014 to 2017. Mosul was a key center on the Silk Road – a network of trade routes – which also contributed to its rich diversity of people and traditions. As Mulder notes, “The city was home to a diverse group of people: Arabs and Kurds, Yazidis, Jews and Christians, Sunnis and Shiites, Sufis and dozens of saints holy to many faiths.”

Among the Islamic State’s destruction of architectural sites in Mosul was the tomb of the Prophet Jonah, a figure revered by all three Abrahamic faiths. Jews venerate Jonah as a symbol of repentance. In the Islamic faith, Jonah, also known as Yūnus, is seen to be an exemplary model for human behavior. In the Christian faith, Jonah’s story appears in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.

Influence of Islam was seen in the cultural history of many countries. Scholar Kishwar Rizvi explains that in medieval Spain, for example, the troubadour poets who were known for their lyrical poetry “borrowed their lyrical beauty from Arabic.” Until the 15th century, as Rizvi says, Arabic was the courtly language of southern Spain.

The exchange between Islam and other Abrahamic faiths extended to architecture. The famous 12th-century Palatine Chapel in Sicily takes some of its architectural style from the Fatimids, the Shiite rulers of Egypt between the 10th and 12th centuries.

“Such exchanges were common, thanks to the mobility of people as well as ideas,” writes Rizvi.

Understanding the rich history of Islamic art can help counter many presumptions about Islam today. In explaining how different religious views were accommodated within Islam, scholar Ana Silkatcheva points to a 19th-century tile from Iran depicting a crucified Jesus surrounded by the Twelve Apostles.

“In Islamic understanding, Jesus was a prophet, granted the same respect as Muhammad, but did not die on the cross,” Silkatcheva said. “This is evidently a tile made for or by the Christian community in Persia under Islamic rule.”

Art history can be revealing to many Muslims as well. For most Muslims, the depiction of the Prophet Muhammad is considered to be forbidden. However, Silkatcheva writes about a 17th-century manuscript folio that depicts the prophet, suggesting that visual depictions of the prophet were acceptable in the past.

Rizvi offers a reminder from the poetry of 13th-century Muslim mystic Rumi that sums up this belief in peaceful coexistence:

“All religions, all this singing, one song. The differences are just illusion and vanity.”

This article was reviewed for accuracy by Jessica Marglin, Associate Professor of Religion at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

Fact: The Dutch painter Rembrandt collected miniature paintings from the Mughals, a Muslim dynasty that ruled the Indian subcontinent for over 300 years. Silks from the Safavid empire (the Iranian dynasty from the 16th to 18th century) were so popular that Polish kings had their coats of arms woven in Isfahan.
– From an article written by Kishwar Rizvi, Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at Yale University.

In the next issue: Why women wear the headscarf

You can read all six articles in this Understanding Islam series on TheConversation.com, or we can deliver them straight to your inbox if you sign up for our email newsletter course.

Articles from The Conversation in this edition:**

• What’s missing in the teaching of Islam

• On Yom Kippur, remembering Mosul’s rich and diverse past

• No god but God: A breathtaking exhibition bringing Islamic art out of the shadows

Further Reading and Resources:

• “The Shrines of the ‘Alids in Medieval Syria: Sunnis, Shi’is and the Architecture of Coexistence,” by Stephennie Mulder: Scholar Stephennie Mulder’s book on Islamic architecture goes beyond Islam’s sectarian history to reveal a past marked by cooperation and accommodation.

• “Close Encounters in Medieval Provence: Spain’s Role in the Birth of Troubadour Poetry,” by María Rosa Menocal.

• “Mathematics and Islamic Art,” by Lesley Jones: Jones’ journal articles explores Islamic mathematics’ influences in art.

• “How Islam changed medicine,” by Azeem Majeed, professor of primary care at Imperial College Faculty of Medicine in London.

Kalpana Jain, Senior Religion + Ethics Editor, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

As a child, I thrilled to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars series starring John Carter. It wasn’t really science fiction, more of a Western in a strange place. Carter just imagined himself to Mars in a blink of an eye. I even liked the 2012 film, the script of which was co-authored by Michael Chabon (of Kavalier and Clay fame). That film grossed nearly $300 million and would have been a success if Disney had not foolishly spent $400 mn. to make and market it. That was just bad management. The film did what it needed to do.

Then there were Ray Bradbury’s Mars stories. At the end of one of them, the human children colonists want to see the Martians, so their parents have them look at their own reflections in a pool. And as an adult I read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy, in which the author explored the ethics of terraforming another planet (i.e. engineering it to be like earth).

Those themes, of who we are when we travel far from home, and whether we can take home with us– themes of alienation and self-discovery and loss, resonated with me, I think, in part because I grew up in an Army family and went to 12 schools in twelve years growing up, spending much of my childhood and youth in Europe and Africa.

The Ingenuity helicopter is a technical wonder– the first such aircraft that humans have launched on another planet. Mars has a very thin atmosphere, 100th that of earth, but it only has a third of our gravity (Burroughs knew enough science to know that John Carter would be able to jump very high and would be very strong there). To get enough lift for the helicopter, the scientists and engineers at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab had to arrange for its carbon-fiber rotors to make 2,500 revolutions per minute, compared to the 400 to 500 rpm typical of earth helicopters. The helicopter’s inverter also had to be engineered to withstand Mars’s very cold surface temperature.

NASA: “This is the first color image of the Martian surface taken by an aerial vehicle while it was aloft.”

A large team was behind this success, and there is no “I” in “team.” It contained many of the people that the Trump administration tried to exclude from the US, and to demean, including Indian-Americans and Arab-Americans.

One of the team members was Loay Elbasyouni, whose family hailed from Beit Hanoun in Occupied Palestinian Gaza. As Ahmad Abu Shammalh explains at We are not Numbers, Elbasyouni is “the electrical and power electronics lead for the Mars helicopter that the Perseverence carried inside.”

Channel 4 News: “How this NASA engineer went from Gaza to Mars”

Elbasyouni’s parents had gone to Germany, where his father studied medicine, and Loay was born there. The family returned to Gaza, where Loay grew up and where his father worked as a physician. He had to be home-schooled when the first Palestinian uprising (Intifada) broke out in 1986 and his school, managed by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees, closed.

Some 70% of the 2 million Palestinians living in Gaza belong to families who were expelled from what is now southern Israel by Zionist militias in 1948. They were deprived of their lands and homes and property and made penniless, living in tents or hastily erected ramshackle structures. Since 1967 they have been occupied by Israel, which imposed an economically debilitating blockade on the civilian population in 2007 that continues to this day. Because the fundamentalist party-militia Hamas was allowed by Israel and the US to run in the 2006 elections and won, it still governs the Gaza Strip. The US and Israel have declared it a terrorist organization and the Palestinians of Gaza in general suffer from demonization. Some 50% of them are children, and I think we may safely conclude that they are not terrorists.

Loay studied computer and electronics engineering at the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville. One year, 2001, Shammalh explains, Loay had to drop out and work long hours to save up enough to continue his education.

He and his team-mates successfully solved the technological challenges, and Ingenuity has already flown a couple of times, with two more short flights planned.

When Loay posed with Ingenuity on social media, word got out in Gaza and the Middle East, and he was widely interviewed as a Palestinian and Arab success story.

But that sense of alienation and exile that always attends spaceflight, and which Ray Bradbury was most attentive to, also haunts Elbasyouni as a Palestinian.

Middle East Monitor writes,

‘Palestinian from Gaza Loay Elbasyouni has helped American space agency NASA successfully fly a small helicopter on Mars.

Ingenuity Mars Helicopter flew over the red planet two days ago, in a feat which NASA says represents the first powered, controlled flight by an aircraft on another planet.

Elbasyouni, who was . . . raised in Gaza, left the Strip in 2000 “before the Second Intifada” when he was 20 to complete his studies in the US after he won a scholarship.

“For me as a kid I was almost dreaming to become an aerospace engineer, but I decided that it was not a thing for me because I figured Palestine doesn’t have a space programme, so it wasn’t an easy journey,” he told Channel 4 News.

He likened his journey from Gaza to the US to “Mission Impossible”.

Elbasyouni has not returned to his family since he left them in 2000, he said:

It’s really hard to get into Gaza without putting my career at risk. If I go in there, I might get stuck.

“With the Mars situation it’s science that determines things, with science we can calculate everything and predict everything as much as we can, and we stick to our hopes and beliefs and our mathematical proof. But when it comes to situations of politics involving politics it depends on people’s opinions and that’s unpredictable,” he added.’

Bradbury didn’t have to take us all the way to Mars to explore exile and alienation. The Palestinians know all about it.

—–

Al Jazeera English: “Loay Elbasyouni talk to Aljazeera English about helicopter first flight on Mars”

Ashley Strickland at CNN notes,

“Her Excellency Sarah bint Yousef Al Amiri is not only the deputy project manager for the mission, she’s also the minister of state for advanced sciences and chair of the UAE Space Agency and the United Arab Emirates Council of Scientists”

Sarah bint Yusuf al Amiri, h/t Wikipedia.

Maybe George Lucas should have made Princess Leia an Arab.

Strickland reports that many buildings in Dubai were bathed in red light at the news, and the Burj al-Khalifa, one of the tallest skyscrapers int he world, put on a sound and light show.

English-language writing on Muslims and Arabs often throws around the term “medieval.” This Orientalist projection of contemporary Muslim culture into the distant past as a form of othering has been dealt a significant blow by the UAE achievement.

Americans are not surprised that their country can produce NASA scientists but also the QAnon Shaman who invaded our Capitol. They aren’t surprised that some (a minority) of scientists find ways to reconcile science with their Christian faith. But when it comes to the Middle East, many are unwilling to acknowledge the advances as well as the challenges the region faces. In George Lucas’s Star Wars franchise, princess Leia wears loose robes and covers her hair sometimes, without this clothing being seen negatively, but when Muslim women dress similarly, they are branded repressed. The powerful and wealthy Gulf Arab women, however, have often carved out substantial power for themselves in their societies and have shaped the younger generation.

Visitors to Dubai who went through security at the airport Tuesday had their passports stamped with a special commemorative Mars entry visa in red ink made similar in composition to Mars’s famous crimson soil.

SciNews: “Hope Mars Mission Orbit Insertion”

Just at the Marvel Studios Black Panther film sparked a popular interest in Afro-Futurism because it depicted the fictional country of Wakanda as scientifically advanced, it may be that the UAE Mars mission could provoke interest in Arabo-Futurism (a subject well advanced with regard to Gulf architecture, for instance).

Dubai skyline via Flickr.

The satellite will gather information about the massive Mars sandstorms and try to answer the question of whether they have played a role in Mars losing its atmosphere. With a thicker atmosphere and a moderate amount of carbon dioxide to trap heat, Mars could have been relatively earthlike, and may have been early in its history. The loss of its atmosphere led to the loss of its surface water and left it cold and inhospitable to human beings. Regardless of that Matt Damon movie, I don’t think you could grow potatoes in that soil.

Sky News: “UAE’s Hope Probe successfully enters orbit around Mars”

The Emirati scientists praised God on the successful entry of the Hope Proble weather satellite into Mars orbit. They included women in traditional Gulf dress with head coverings, who have some serious calculus skills. Strickland at CNN reports that the average age of the Emirati engineers who worked on the project was only 27. Women comprised 34% of the engineering team, she reports, and they made up fully 80% of the science team. One of the purposes of the project is to build Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) knowledge among Emirati youth.

Instead of wasting scarce funds on the Space Force, the Biden administration should deploy its diplomats to demilitarize space.

( Foreign Policy in Focus) – When President-elect Joe Biden takes office on January 21, he will be faced with some very expensive problems, from bailing out the COVID-19 economy to getting a handle on climate change. Vaccinating over 300 million people will not be cheap, and wrestling the U.S.’s hydrocarbon-based economy in the direction of renewable energies will come with a hefty price tag.

One place to find some of that money would be to respond to Russian, Chinese, and United Nations (UN) proposals to demilitarize space, heading off what will be an expensive — and destabilizing — arms race for the new high ground.

The Militarization of Space

Last December, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) created the Space Force, although a major push to increase the military’s presence in space dates back to the Obama administration.

In fact, space has always had a military aspect to it, and no country is more dependent on that dimension than the United States. A virtual cloud of surveillance satellites spy on adversaries, tap into communications, and monitor military maneuvers and weapons tests. It was a U.S. Vela Hotel satellite that caught the Israelis and the South Africans secretly testing a nuclear warhead in the southern Indian Ocean in 1979.

While other countries have similar platforms in space, the U.S. is the only country with a world-wide military presence, and it is increasingly dependent on satellites to enhance its armed forces. Such satellites allow drone operators to call in missile strikes from half a world away without risking the lives of pilots.

The U.S. is not the only country with armed drones. Turkish and Israeli drones demonstrated their effectiveness in the recent war between Azerbaijan and Armenia, and scores of countries produce armed drones. But no other country wages war from tens of thousands of miles away.

American drones stalk adversaries in Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East piloted from air conditioned trailers in southern Nevada. “It’s only really the U.S. that needs to conduct military operations anywhere in the world all the time against anyone,” Brian Weeden of the Secure World Federation told Scientific American in the magazine’s November article, “Orbital Aggression: How do we prevent war in space?”

According to the DOD, it is the Russians and the Chinese who have taken the initiative to militarize space, although most of that is ancient news and a lot of it is based more on supposition than fact. Moscow, Beijing, and Washington have long had the ability to take out an opponent’s satellites, and have demonstrated that on a number of occasions. It takes no great skill to do so. Satellites generally have very predictable orbits and speeds. Astrophysicist Laura Greco of the Union of Concerned Scientists calls them “sitting ducks.”

Satellites do, however, have the capacity to maneuver. Indeed, it was a recent encounter between a Russian Cosmos “inspection” satellite and a U.S. spy satellite that kicked off the latest round of “the Russians are coming!” rhetoric from the Pentagon. The Americans accused the Cosmos of potentially threatening the American satellite by moving close to it, although many independent observers shrugged their shoulders. “That’s what an inspection satellite does,” says Weeden. “It is hard to see at this point why the U.S. is making it a big deal.”

The ‘Star Wars’ Lobby

One reason? Because blaster rattling loosens Congressional purse strings.

China’s military and civilian space budget is estimated to be $8.4 billion. Russia’s is a comparatively modest $3 billion. In contrast, the U.S. space budget is at $48 billion and climbing, and that figure doesn’t account for secret black budget items like the X-37B unmanned space plane.

The DOD points to the fact that the Chinese have launched more satellites in the past year than the U.S., but that is a reflection of the fact that the U.S. currently dominates space, both on the military and the civilian side. Other countries — like India and the European Union — are simply trying to catch up. Out of 3,200 live satellites currently in orbit, the U.S. controls 1,327.

Space is, indeed, essential for the modern world. Satellites don’t just spy or direct drones. They are central to communication systems, banking, weather predictions, and monitoring everything from climate change to tectonic plate movement. An actual war in space that destroyed the satellite networks would cause a worldwide blackout and likely lead to a ground war.

Which is why it is so important to sit down with Russia, China, and the UN and work out a way to keep space a realm for peace, not war. While there are treaties that cover weaponizing space, they are dated. The 1967 Treaty on Outer Space keeps nuclear weapons from being deployed, but it doesn’t cover ground-launched or space-launched anti-satellite weapons, or how close a satellite has to get to another country’s satellite to be considered a threat.

In 2008, and again in 2014, Moscow and Beijing proposed a Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space Treaty. So far, the U.S. has not formally responded, and rejected four resolutions proposed by the UN’s General Assembly on preventing the militarization of space. There have been informal talks between the Russians and Americans, but the last three U.S. administrations have essentially stonewalled serious discussions.

Of course, the U.S. currently holds most of the cards, but that is shortsighted thinking. Adversaries always figure out how to overcome their disadvantages. The U.S. was the first country to launch an anti-satellite weapon in 1959, but the Russians matched it four years later. China destroyed one of its old satellites in 2007, and India claims it has such a weapon as well.

But there is strong opposition to such an agreement in the Pentagon and the Congress, in part because of growing tensions between Russia, China, and the U.S., and in part because of the power of corporations. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics stand to reap billions in profits by supplying the hardware to dominate space. Added to the formidable lobbying power of the major arms corporations is another layer of up and comers like Virgin Galactic, SpaceX, and Blue Origin.

Hard Choices

The Space Force also has bipartisan support. Some 188 Democrats joined 189 Republicans to pass the National Defense Authorization Act for 2020.

The creation of the Space Force has not exactly been met with open arms by the other military services. Each of the services have their own space-based systems and the budgets that go along with that, and they jealously guard their turf. For the time being Space Force is under the Air Force’s wing, but its budget is separate, and few doubt that it will soon become a service in its own right.

At this point the outlay for the Force will be $200 billion over five years, but military budgets have a way of increasing geometrically. The initial outlay for the Reagan administration’s missile-intercepting “Star Wars” system was small, but it has eaten up over $200 billion to date and is still chugging along, in spite of the fact that it is characterized more for failure than success.

The Biden administration will have to make hard choices around the pandemic and climate change while continuing to spend close to $1 trillion a year on its military. Adding yet another military service when American states are reeling from the economic fallout of COVID-19 and the warming oceans are churning out superstorms is something neither the U.S. nor the world can afford.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

We can learn a lot about climate change from Venus, our sister planet. Venus currently has a surface temperature of 450℃ (the temperature of an oven’s self-cleaning cycle) and an atmosphere dominated by carbon dioxide (96 per cent) with a density 90 times that of Earth’s.

Venus is a very strange place, totally uninhabitable, except perhaps in the clouds some 60 kilometres up where the recent discovery of phosphine may suggest floating microbial life. But the surface is totally inhospitable.

However, Venus once likely had an Earth-like climate. According to recent climate modelling, for much of its history Venus had surface temperatures similar to present day Earth. It likely also had oceans, rain, perhaps snow, maybe continents and plate tectonics, and even more speculatively, perhaps even surface life.

Less than one billion years ago, the climate dramatically changed due to a runaway greenhouse effect. It can be speculated that an intensive period of volcanism pumped enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to cause this great climate change event that evaporated the oceans and caused the end of the water cycle.

Evidence of change

This hypothesis from the climate modellers inspired Sara Khawja, a master’s student in my group (co-supervised with geoscientist Claire Samson), to look for evidence in Venusian rocks for this proposed climatic change event.

Since the early 1990s, my Carleton University research team — and more recently my Siberian team at Tomsk State University — have been mapping and interpreting the geological and tectonic history of Earth’s remarkable sister planet.

Soviet Venera and Vega missions of the 1970s and 1980s did land on Venus and take pictures and evaluated the composition of the rocks, before the landers failed due to the high temperature and pressure. However, our most comprehensive view of the surface of Venus has been provided by NASA’s Magellan spacecraft in the early 1990s, which used radar to see through the dense cloud layer and produce detailed images of more than 98 per cent of Venus’s surface.

NASA: “Magellan: Venus False-Color Terrain”

Ancient rocks

Our search for geological evidence of the great climate change event led us to focus on the oldest type of rocks on Venus, called tesserae, which have a complex appearance suggestive of a long, complicated geological history. We thought that these oldest rocks had the best chance of preserving evidence of water erosion, which is a such an important process on Earth and should have occurred on Venus prior to the great climate change event.

Given poor resolution altitude data, we used an indirect technique to try to recognize ancient river valleys. We demonstrated that younger lava flows from the surrounding volcanic plains had filled valleys in the margins of tesserae.

To our astonishment these tesserae valley patterns were very similar to river flow patterns on Earth, leading to our suggestion that these tesserae valleys were formed by river erosion during a time with Earth-like climatic conditions. My Venus research groups at Carleton and Tomsk State universities are studying the post-tesserae lava flows for any geological evidence of the transition to extremely hot conditions.

Earth analogies

In order to understand how volcanism on Venus could produce such a change in climate, we can look to Earth history for analogues. We can find analogies in super-eruptions like the last eruption at Yellowstone that occurred 630,000 years.

But such volcanism is small compared to large igneous provinces (LIPs) that occur approximately every 20-30 million years. These eruption events can release enough carbon dioxide to cause catastrophic climate change on Earth, including mass extinctions. To give you a sense of scale, consider that the smallest LIPs produce enough magma to cover all of Canada to a depth of about 10 metres. The largest known LIP produced enough magma that would have covered an area the size of Canada to a depth of nearly eight kilometres.

The LIP analogues on Venus include individual volcanoes that are up to 500 kilometres across, extensive lava channels that reach up to 7,000 kilometres long, and there are also associated rift systems — where the crust is pulling apart — up to 10,000 kilometres long.

If LIP-style volcanism was the cause of the great climate change event on Venus, then could similar climate change happen on Earth? We can imagine a scenario many millions of years in the future when multiple LIPs randomly occurring at the same time could cause Earth to have such runaway climate change leading to conditions like present-day Venus.

Richard Ernst, Scientist-in-Residence, Earth Sciences, Carleton University (also a professor at Tomsk State University, Russia), Carleton University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

I am amused by the exchange because it reverses stereotypes. Musk is the founder of SpaceX and the electric car company, Tesla, and so is closely associated with the world of science and hi-tech. But he said something superstitious and backward.

He was replied to by Egyptian archeologists at the cutting edge of scientific discovery.

Moreover, as Sarah E. Bond has argued at Hyperallergic, theories of aliens constructing ancient buildings and artifacts in Afro-Asia were tinged with racism. I’m not saying that Musk intended any such thing, but these wild theories have the effect of robbing non-European civilizations of their achievements. Bond points out that one of the first to put forward such an idea, albeit as fiction, was science fiction writer Garrett P. Serviss, who published Edison’s Conquest of Mars in 1898.

It is this diminution of Egyptian greatness that caused the archeologists and scientists there to react so swiftly to Musk’s Tweet. Egypt today is only like 128th in the world for nominal GDP per capita out of 186 countries measured by the IMF, being poorer than Bolivia or the Philippines. Since the 1973 war with Israel, which was fought to a draw, it has largely withdrawn from regional geopolitics, and though it has a well-equipped army, it hasn’t fought any wars for a very long time. Egypt is having unusual difficulty in doing anything that the IMF or the World Bank would recognize as significant “development,” which is to say that it has economically stagnated. That was one reason for its 2011 youth revolution.

So, Egypt’s highly significant contributions to world civilization are something it has going for it, and being robbed of any of them by someone from the First World is painful.

The ancient Egyptians, of course, built the pyramids. The tallest and oldest of the Giza pyramids is that of Khufu (d. 2566 BC), popularly known as Cheops. It was the tallest building in the world until a cathedral finally outstripped it in Europe in the 1300s AD. The pyramids were built as tombs for the Pharaohs. I lived about four years of my life in Egypt and have visited Giza on several occasions.

In the 1990s, archeologists actually discovered the cemetery of the builders themselves. By the way, they were skilled craftsmen paid a good wage, not slaves, and some of their papyrus documents were recovered. Some were bakers, others were brewers of beer. There is evidence that one of them was operated on for brain cancer and he lived for a couple of years afterwards. Thousands of them worked for thirty years on the project. Anthropologists posit that the laborers were recruited from villages in the region of the planned buildings.

Internal ramps were used to raise the pyramids, and 3-D models of their interiors are now being programmed that will shed light on the ramp technology:

That Musk allows for the possibility of aliens is not illogical, though attributing the pyramids to them is.

Given that there are 100 billion to 200 billion galaxies in the universe, and each galaxy has 100 billion or so stars, it has long struck thoughtful observers that it is highly unlikely that human beings are the only intelligent life out there. The discovery by astronomers of earth-like planets only heightens these odds. The problem is that civilizations should produce electromagnetic signals (our own radio and television broadcasts are going out into space at the speed of light), but we haven’t detected any such thing. It seems to take 4 billion years on an earth-sized planet around a G-type yellow star for intelligent life to evolve, and my guess is that for some reason the requisite conditions weren’t present in the early universe, which is 13.8 billion years old. So, human beings could just be one of the first to make it this far. We’re doing our damnedest, between brandishing hydrogen bombs and heating up the planet with carbon dioxide, to drive ourselves extinct, and it may be that high intelligence is itself hard for a species to survive.