Between a Rock and a Hard Place

ESA

Science Snap (#20): Sentinal-1A Dress Rehearsal

February 27, 2014

On the 3rd April 2014 the new satellite Sentinel-1 will be launched from French Guinea into space. It’s the satellite that has the InSAR community pretty excited as it will provide free Earth Observation data covering nearly all the world’s volcanoes.

Once the satellite is launched and is sat in its correct orbit, it has to “perform a complicated dance routine to unfold its large solar wings and radar antenna“. The ESA video below shows a fast motion test run of this unfloding in the cleanroom at Thales Alenia Space in Cannes, France.

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Copyright: ESA

Science snaps (1): Africa’s Ups and Downs

August 16, 2013

Each week we’ll be featuring our favourite ‘science snaps’ on the blog. These posts will showcase images, photos, films and figures that we encounter on a day-to-day basis, as well as things which we simply think are cool and should be gawped at. All of the contributors to Between a Rock work in various veins of volcanology and so the upcoming images will be quite diverse…

Without further ado, and trying to keep to the snappy title, I’m starting off with a 3D animation flying through the East Africa Rift zooming into areas of volcano and earthquake deformation observed from satellite imagery.

The animation by the European Space Agency is titled “Africa’s ups and downs” and predominately features the work of Juliet Biggs here in the Bristol School of Earth Sciences.

Watch the video and have a look at the webpage that explains the science of the techniques used. Credits: Planetary Visions/NERC-COMET/JAXA/ESA

http://youtu.be/hwA7LXA-SCg