2023 Author: Bryan Walter | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-21 22:24
Read this and other space stuff on the Green Cat blog
The meteorological satellite "Electro-L No. 2" began to upload images in full resolution. Previously, images of the new satellite were published only in the viewing mode, but now the Earth can be studied with a detail of one kilometer per pixel with an update every half an hour.
I talked a lot about the work of the Electro-L satellite, built at the S. А. Lavochkin. From a height of 36 thousand kilometers, he filmed the Earth every 30 minutes, creating magnificent large-format images of the eastern hemisphere. The images were in the public domain on the server of the Scientific Center for Operational Monitoring of the Earth (NTsOMZ) and anyone who wished could study them.
The detailing of images from a geostationary orbit, of course, cannot be compared with google maps, but the images made it possible to examine the planet in dynamics. Any sufficiently large-scale event in the satellite's field of view could be viewed from above, be it sandstorms, typhoons or refinery fires.
Due to the stationary position of the satellite relative to the surface of the Earth for several years, it was possible to observe the entire hemisphere. For example, create a video like this that most clearly shows why the daylight hours are longer and warmer in summer, and dark and cold in winter.
For those interested in the work of the satellite, we opened the Electro-L Vkontakte community. Other groups of enthusiasts have opened up automatic twitter for the satellite and developed the DeskChanger Electro-L app, which brings the latest satellite imagery to the desktop.
Light Production made an infographic of the project.
Big size
and an interactive presentation:
Two years ago, Elektro-L started having technical problems with the orientation system, the pictures began to drift apart, and the quality dropped. Half a year later, the operability was partially restored, but the previous regularity of shooting did not work out. Last year, Roskosmos launched a replacement, Electro-L No. 2. Technically, the satellite was launched identical, only some shortcomings of the first one were corrected. The second one should work longer and the quality of the images is better.
The problem was that no pictures were uploaded from the second device. If from "Electro-L No. 1" all the data was on an open server, then from the new one they began to upload only frames with a resolution of 1000 × 1000 pixels. This was still enough for Twitter and the desktop, but you can't do anything more serious with them.
Fortunately, the general designer of Roskosmos for automatic space systems Viktor Khartov was able to inform about this problem during our open meeting "Space without formulas" at the Museum of Cosmonautics, and here you go, 160 megabytes of archives with full-size frames from all ten spectral ranges.
Every half hour, a new snapshot of our planet appears. Taking this opportunity, as an example, I made an animation of the weather over Central Russia on June 4, 2017.
The brown color scheme is not a reason to lament about the deforested forests and desertification of the planet, but the result of capturing a satellite of light in the near infrared range of the spectrum by the camera. The redness seen in the photo is the chlorophyll of living vegetation, which effectively reflects infrared light. To return the usual greenery, you have to shaman in Photoshop.
From open images, you can simply inspect half of the planet, or practice weather forecasts. Data from all ten spectral bands of the satellite (albeit in.jpg
For simplified work with images, employees of NTsOMZ created a separate sub-site "Electro-L".
Everyone can think for themselves how to use this data. They are open to us, so it is a sin not to use them. I, as before, will share if something interesting falls into our Earth's orbital webcam.
The original text in the Green Cat Live Journal
