Mount Ruapehu is a 2,797-meter (9,177-foot) peak on New Zealand's North Island that's popular with skiers and snowboarders and other outdoor adventurers. One of the most-active volcanos in New Zealand, major eruptions occur approximately every 50 years, most recently in 1895, 1945 and 1995.
The European Union-funded Galileo satellite navigation system added its 13th and 14th satellites after a successful launch atop a Soyuz rocket from French Guiana on May 24, 2016. Nearly four hours after liftoff, the twin Galileos were deployed into orbit approximately 23,522 kilometers above Earth.
The Alberta Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry reports that the Fort McMurray wildfire is now estimated to be more than 522,892 hectacres in size (1,292,094 acres”an area larger than the state of Rhode Island).
In May 2016, 17 CubeSats were released by the NanoRacks CubeSat Deployer on the International Space Station. The Dove satellites are part of a constellation designed, built and operated by Planet Labs to take Earth images for humanitarian and environmental applications ranging from monitoring deforestation and urbanization to improving natural-disaster relief and agricultural yields in developing nations.
Working in difficult and frozen conditions 3,000 meters above sea level, with only a small time window due to changing weather and potentially melting surroundings, explorers, photographers and scientists used a laser scanner, an unmanned aerial system (UAS) vehicle and cameras to map out The Abyss of Cenote, one of the largest glacial caves in the Italian Dolomites.
Even before the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) renaming transformed the agency from the more-static-sounding National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), the organization was hard at work to speed and ease the workflow of turning raw images into insight. The organization has been at the technological forefront of exploiting imagery and continues to provide valuable information in a timely manner that impacts missions and lives.
On March 9, 2016, and approximately 1 million miles from Earth, NASA's Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) captured the shadow of the Moon moving across Earth's sunlit face. The only total solar eclipse of 2016 moved across the Indian Ocean and past Indonesia and Australia into the open waters and islands of Oceania and the Pacific Ocean.
Planned for launch on Oct. 13, 2016, the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-R Series (GOES-R or GOES-16 as it will be known once operational), is the first of a new generation of geostationary weather satellites that will include GOES-S, T and U.
Building on the practice of precision agriculture and exploiting recent computer advances, the Chesapeake Conservancy (CC) is developing open-source geoprocessing and analysis tools that help environmental nonprofits and local-government agencies prioritize conservation and restoration decision making. From creating new, high-resolution land-cover data and flow-path analyses based on LiDAR elevation data to developing custom Web applications, it's giving partners with little or no expertise in GIS or complex modeling access to large-scale data and modeling produced by state and federal agencies as well as larger non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
Working in difficult and frozen conditions 3,000 meters above sea level, with only a small time window due to changing weather and potentially melting surroundings, explorers, photographers and scientists used a laser scanner, an unmanned aerial system (UAS) vehicle and cameras to map out The Abyss of Cenote, one of the largest glacial caves in the Italian Dolomites.
