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Satellite Help Against Famine
| Article
# : |
18460 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1990 |
1,074 Words |
| Author
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Fabrizio del Piero
Fabrizio del Piero is an Italian journalist specializing in
international affairs who has worked in the United States for
several years as a Washington correspondent for ANSA, the
Italian news agency. He is presently regional information
officer (Europe) at the FAO in Rome. |
For decades, Western nations have been putting surveying satellites in orbit to observe the earth but inevitably, thinking mainly of their own national interests. For example, better weather forecasts are obtained thanks to geostationary spacecraft placed at the equator, over the very center of Africa. Much other data, acquired at the same time, would have been precious for the developing countries, but remained unutilized.
This information is now being put to good use. The Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations has brought together European and American space agencies and research institutions willing to put their generosity and advanced technological skills into a complex but worthwhile endeavor to promote food security in the Third World.
The challenge is to create a special system designed to collect, process, analyze, and distribute to developing countries - starting with Africa and the Near East - valuable satellite information and imagery concerning their agricultural production prospects.
The system is made up of two components, called ARTEMIS and DIANA. Neither name has anything to do with the Greek-Roman goddess of the hunt. In fact, they are easy-to-remember acronyms standing for complicated technical jargon. ARTEMIS means “Africa Real-Time Environmental Monitoring using Imaging Satellites”; DIANA stands for “Data and Information Available Now in Africa.”
ARTEMIS has been in operation at the FAO Remote Sensing Center in Rome since August 1988. It constitutes the receiving and processing component of the system. It was designed by the National Aerospace Laboratory (NLR) of the Netherlands according to FAO specifications and built by the NLR in cooperation with the U.S. space agency NASA and the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. Funding - some $3.5 million - was ensured by a special trust fund from the government of the Netherlands, a generous donor to many FAO projects concerned with rural poverty.
Through an unobtrusive antenna dish installed on a terrace on FAO premises in Rome, ARTEMIS receives directly every hour the data relayed to earth by the European meteorological satellite METEOSAT, in an equatorial orbit over Africa. Daily data from another satellite, the American NOAA-11 orbiting around the poles, is also received on magnetic tape from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric
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