Headlines

U.S. Deputy Secretary of Transportation John Porcari told a congressional committee today (February 8, 2012) that the expenditure of “substantial federal resources” in assisting LightSquared to gain approval for its terrestrial wireless broadband system was “unusual” yet “merited,” but that “further investment cannot be justified at this time.” Porcari is co-chair of the National Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) Executive Committee (ExCom), which recently told the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) that two rounds of testing LightSquared’s transmissions had shown such widespread interference to GPS that no further tests were needed. Read More

Satellite researcher Alan Belward works for the Institute for Environment and Sustainability, part of the European Commission’s Joint Research Center in Ispra, Italy. Dr. Belward heads the Land Resource Management Unit, which looks at changes to land cover and land use on a global scale. In 2011, Dr. Belward was part of the most comprehensive forest survey ever, which involved 190 countries. An essential tool for his research is data from the Landsat satellite program, which has taken detailed pictures of forest canopies for over 40 years. Dr. Belward spoke with EarthSky’s Jorge Salazar about tracking Earth’s forests from space. Read More

DHS is planning to spend up to $50 million to hire as many as four contractors to provide “aerial remote sensing” services, that will include taking photos from airborne sensors of homeland security missions and emergency incidents, processing those images and disseminating them throughout the department. The chosen vendors will be asked to collect aerial imagery using digital cameras in what are known as “vertical” or “oblique” renditions to support emergency and non-emergency incidents nationwide. Read More

A rush by the Energy Department to use stimulus money to modernize the country’s power grid has left the system vulnerable to cyberattacks, the agency’s internal watchdog found. Inspector General Gregory H. Friedman found “shortcomings” in the cybersecurity plans of more than a third of the utility companies that got federal funding for “smart grid” projects — from incomplete strategies to prevent an attack to vague steps for stopping one if it started. Read More

Farmers who claim more EU subsidies than they should, or who break Common Agricultural Policy rules, are now more likely to be caught out by a camera in the sky than an inspector calling with a clipboard. How do they feel about being watched from above? Read More

Autonomous cars, once the stuff of science fiction, are here. Google’s self-driving Toyota Prius hybrids have racked up more than 140,000 miles on public roads. Audi has sent a driverless TTS racing to the summit of Pikes Peak. Just about every major automaker has similar projects underway. Read More