Evaluating research for disruptive innovation in the space sector

HE ownership of resulting from T government financed research and development constitutes a very controversial problem. The federal government mainly the Department of Defense (DOD) has permitted industrial firms to obtain the patent rights to most of the inventions emerging from its contract research, under the so-called with the government acquiring royaltyfree licenses on the inventions. Our task here is an empirical investigation of one of the issues in the controversy over federal patent policy, namely, the concentration of resulting from the operation of the license policy. One of the strongest objections to the license policy rests on the belief that it causes undue concentration of economic power. The objection has been raised repeatedly by attorneys general, by legislators, and by economists who favor the so-called ' under which the government retains ownership of resulting from its contract research. From records of the United States Patent Office, we have compiled data for the period 1946 to 1962 on the numbers of assigned to business firms that have been the research and development (R and D) for the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the Department of Defense, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The data are neither estimates nor samples; they are complete counts. The three agencies account for nearly all of the issued under the license policy to contractors. Henceforth, we shall refer to these as license-policy patents. We also have data on the private patents resulting from the company financed R and D of the same contractors. The major R and D contractors are 177 business firms that were among the first 100 of DOD in any fiscal year from 1955 to 1962, or who had contract awards of $2 million or more from the AEC or from NASA.2 Of these 177 firms, 40 are among the first 100 in Fortune's list for 1962. Another 49 are among Fortune's 500 companies. A further 36 have been officially stamped as small businesses. With the exception of a few of the bigger chemical and oil companies that have done little or no research for the federal government, the names of nearly all the Schumpeterian giants of American industry are on our list. By treating each firm and its subsidiaries as a unit, we overstate patent concen* The research underlying this article was supported by a grant (NsG 425) from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to The George Washington University. 1 Department of Justice, Investigations of Government Patent Practices and Policies: Report and Recommendations of the Attorney General to the President 1 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1947), 37; Report of the Attorney General Pursuant to Section 708 (e) of the Defense Production Act of 1950, as Amended (Nov. 9, 1956, mimeo.); Clair Wilcox, Public Policies Toward Business (Homewood, Ill.: Richard D. Irwin, 1960), 191; Walter Adams and Horace M. Gray, Monopoly in America: The Government as Promotor (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 47, 94, and 148-152. Testimony against the license policy and in favor of the title policy was given to a Senate subcommittee in 1963 by Horace M. Gray, Robert F. Lanzillotti, Wassily W. Leontief, Richard R. Nelson, and Lee E. Preston. See Aspects of Government Patent Policies, Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Select Committee on Small Business, United States Senate, 88th Congress, First Session, Impact of Government Patent Policies on Economic Growth, Scientific and Technological Progress, Competition, and Opportunities for Small Business, March 7, 8, 13, and 14, 1963 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1963). Only Leontief (p. 236), however, addressed himself specifically to the question of concentration. 2 Department of Defense, 500 Contractors Listed According to Net Value of Military Prime Contract Awards for Experimental, Development Test and Research Work (Fiscal years 1955 through 1962, mimeo.); and Files of the Atomic Energy Commission and published reports of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. 'Usually, government employees are required to assign title to the government. However, if a government employee, with his own resources, produces an invention that his agency wants, the government frequently files the patent application in exchange for a royalty-free license. Also, if an agency does not want a government financed invention made by an employee, the employee often is permitted to acquire title. Regulations governing employees were tightened in 1950. This fact and the relative growth of contract research are the causes of the decline in the number of licenses from employees after 1950.

The Landsat program is a joint United States Geological Survey (USGS) and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) enterprise for Earth Observation (EO), that represents the world’s longest running system of satellites for moderate-resolution optical remote sensing. The European Space Agency (ESA) has acquired Landsat data over Europe through the ESA ground stations over the last 40 years, in co-operation with USGS and NASA. A new ESA Landsat Multi-Spectral Scanner (MSS), Thematic Mapper (TM) and Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) processor has been developed. This enhanced processor aligns the historical Landsat products to the highest quality standards that can be achieved with the current knowledge of the instruments. The updated processor is mainly based on the USGS algorithm; however the ESA processor has some different features that are detailed in this paper. Using this upgraded processor, ESA is currently performing for the first time a bulk-processing of its entire Landsat series MSS/TM/ETM+ historical archive to make all products available to users. Current achievements include the processing and online distribution of approximately 290 000 new Landsat 5 TM high-quality products acquired at the Kiruna ground station between 1983 and 2011. The Landsat 5 TM bulk-processed products are made available for direct download after registration at: https://earth.esa.int/web/guest/pi-community/apply for-data/fast-registration. The remainder of the ESA’s Landsat data, dating back more than 40 years, will gradually become available for all users during the course of 2014. The ESA Landsat processor algorithm enhancement, together with the results of the ESA archive bulk-processing, and an overview on the data quality on a subset of the Landsat 5 TM data are herein presented.

Personal computers of the past were limited to running computational fluid dynamics codes in serial mode. With the advent of multicore technology and suitable compilers, personal computers nowadays can execute codes in a parallel fashion similar to that of supercomputers and cluster computer systems. This article investigated what performance can be achieved when executing an aerodynamic code on an Intel quad core based personal computer with an OpenMP compiler in a Windows environment. The code solved the Euler equations to find the flowfield around a NACA0012 aerofoil on an O-type boundary fitted structured grid system. A speedup of up to 350% was obtainable in double precision accuracy. The reduced computation time means that, for small scale problems, more accurate Euler codes can replace commonly used transonic small disturbance codes. For larger problems, this information serves as a reference for developers of hybrid MPI/OpenMP algorithms for cluster computer systems. References Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), AMD FireStream 9170: Industry's First GPU with Double-Precision Floating Point, 2007, http://ati.amd.com/products/streamprocessor/specs.html Allmaras, S. R., Venkatakrishnan, V., and Johnson, F. T., Farfield Boundary Conditions for 2-D Airfoils, AIAA Paper 2005-4711, AIAA, 2005. Bailey, D., Barszcz, E., Barton, J., Browning, D., Carter, R., Dagum, L., Fatoohi, R., Fineberg, S., Frederickson, P., Lasinski, T., Schreiber, R., Simon, H., Venkatakrishnan, V., and Weeratunga, S., The NAS Parallel Benchmarks, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Contractor Report 203186, USA, 1994, http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19970014936_1997021577.pdf Dong, S., and Karniadakis, G. E., Dual-Level Parallelism for High-Order CFD Methods, Parallel Computing, 30, Jan. 2004, pp. 1--20. Hirsch, C., Numerical Computation of Internal and External Flows (Volume 2): Computational Methods for Inviscid and Viscous Flows, John Wiley and Sons, Great Britain, 1992. Hoffmann, K. A., Computational Fluid Dynamics for Engineers, Engineering Educational System, Texas, USA, 1989. Intel, Tera-scale Computing Research Program, c.2007, http://www.intel.com/research/platform/terascale/ Jin, H., Frumkin, M., and Yan, J., The OpenMP Implementation of NAS Parallel Benchmarks and its Performance, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Technical Report NAS-99-011, Moffett Field, USA, 1999. Liu, Y., and Vinokur, M., Nonequilibrium Flow Computations 1: An Analysis of Numerical Formulations of Conservation Laws, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Contractor Report 177489, California, USA, 1988, http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19880021000_1988021000.pdf Lock, R. C., Test Cases for Numerical Methods in Two-Dimensional Transonic Flows, Advisory Group for Aerospace Research and Development (AGARD), Report Number 575, 1970. Ly, E., Improved Approximate Factorisation Algorithm for the Steady Subsonic and Transonic Flow over an Aircraft Wing, Proceedings of the 21st Congress of the International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences (ICAS98), ICAS and AIAA, Melbourne, Australia, 1998, Paper A98-31699. Ly, E., and Gear, J. A., Time-Linearized Transonic Computations Including Shock Wave Motion Effects, Journal of Aircraft, 39, 6, Nov/Dec. 2002, pp. 964--972. Ly, E., and Nakamichi, J., Time-Linearised Transonic Computations Including Entropy, Vorticity and Shock Wave Motion Effects, The Aeronautical Journal, Nov. 2003, pp. 687--695. Ly, E., and Norrison, D., Automatic Elliptic Grid Generation by an Approximate Factorisation Algorithm, ANZIAM Journal, 48 (CTAC2006), pp. C188--C202, July 2007, http://anziamj.austms.org.au/ojs/index.php/ANZIAMJ/article/view/48. Ly, E., and Norrison, D., Generating Elliptic Grids in Three Dimensions by a Method of False Transients, ANZIAM Journal, 49 (EMAC2007), pp. C170--C183, Nov. 2007, http://anziamj.austms.org.au/ojs/index.php/ANZIAMJ/article/view/313. Nvidia, The Era of the Personal Supercomputer, 2007, http://www.nvidia.com/content/events/siggraph_2007/supercomputing.html Pope, S. B., A Perspective on Turbulence Modeling, Modeling Complex Turbulent Flows, Kluwer Academic Publishers, The Netherlands, 1999. Pulliam, T., Kutler, P., and Rossow, V., Harvard Lomax: His Quiet Legacy to Computational Fluid Dynamics, 14th AIAA Computational Fluid Dynamics Conference, Norfolk, VA, 28 June-1 July, 1999, http://people.nas.nasa.gov/ pulliam/mypapers/lomax_la.ps Steger, J. L., and Warming, R. F., Flux Vector Splitting of the Inviscid Gasdynamic Equations with Application to Finite Difference Methods, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Technical Memorandum 78605, California, USA, 1979, http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19790020779_1979020779.pdf Thompson, J. R., Warsi, Z. U. A., and Mastin, C. W., Numerical Grid Generation: Foundations and Applications, Elsevier Science Publishing Co. Inc., New York, USA, 1985. Van Leer, B., Flux-Vector Splitting for the Euler Equations, Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Numerical Methods in Fluid Dynamics, Aachen, West Germany, 1982.

Space environmental effects on materials are very severe and complex because of the synergistic interaction of orbital environments such as high-energy radiation particles, atomic oxygen, micrometeoroids, orbital debris, and ultraviolet irradiation interacting synergistically, along with thermal exposure. In addition, surface degradation associated with contamination can negatively impact optics performance. Materials flight experiments are critical to understanding the engineering performance of materials exposed to specific space environments. Likewise, the spacecraft designer must have an understanding of the specific environment in which a spacecraft will operate, enabling appropriate selection of materials to maximize engineering performance, increase mission lifetimes, and reduce risk. This article will present a methodology for assessing the engineering performance of materials baselined for a specific spacecraft or mission. In addition, an overview of the space environment, from low Earth orbit to interplanetary space, will be provided along with an overview on the effects of the space environment on materials performance. The majority of this article is devoted to materials flight experiments from the European Space Agency (ESA), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), and from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Some of the experiments reviewed include ESA's Materials Exposure and Degradation Experiment on the International Space Station (ISS), JAXA's Micro-Particles Capturer and Space Environment Exposure Device experiments on the ISS Service Module and on the ISS Japanese Experiment Module Exposed Facility, and NASA's Long Duration Exposure Facility satellite and the Materials International Space Station Experiment series flown on the exterior of ISS.

Space travel: medicine in extremes

The Seventh Symposium on the Role of the Vestibular Organs in Space Exploration was held at the European Space Technology Centre (ESTEC), in Noordwijk, The Netherlands, on June 7–9, 2006. The host for this conference was the European Space Agency (ESA). The conference was co-sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI). There have been six previous NASA-sponsored symposia in this series. Written proceedings of the first five symposia, held between 1965–1970 in Pensacola, Florida, are available from the NASA Technical Reports Server (http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp, and enter “Role of Vestibular Organs” as the search term). The Sixth NASA Symposium was held in Portland, Oregon in 2002. The program and abstracts from this meeting were published by the Journal of Vestibular Research as part of Volume 11 (3–5); these abstracts can be accessed through the IOS Press web site (http://iospress.metapress.com/home/main.mpx). In addition, most of the papers from the Sixth Symposium were submitted to the Journal of Vestibular Research and appear as Volume 13 (4–6). Each of the seven Symposia on the Role of the Vestibular Organs in Space Exploration address the adverse physiological effects mediated by the vestibular system in humans exposed to microgravity. A European venue was particularly appropriate for the Seventh Symposium, since the space neurovestibular field has become increasingly international. Researchers from many countries have had the opportunity to conduct experiments on the Russian Mir station, the US Space Shuttle, and the International Space Station. Symposium participants included more than one hundred scientists, flight surgeons, postdoctoral fellows and students from Europe, the US, Canada, Russia and Japan. It was an exciting three day meeting: More than 50 platform presentations and 20 posters were presented, describing results from investigations in spaceflight, parabolic flight, and ground laboratories. Session topics included the vestibulo-ocular reflex, clinical assessment of vestibular disorders, neurophysiology, spatial orientation, spaceflight countermeasures, balance and locomotion, motion sickness, otolith and semicircular canal physiology, and artificial gravity. The meeting concluded with an international panel discussion on challenges and opportunities in space research. We would like to thank the Journal of Vestibular Research for this Special Issue devoted to papers presented at this Symposium. We would also like to thank the presenters who submitted full papers, which underwent peer-review, for this special issue. The web site for the Symposium (http://www.congrex.nl/06a07/) contains the full scientific program; many of the slide presentations and posters are also available at this web site.

<p indent="0mm">Deep space exploration is one of the frontiers of scientific research and driven by human instincts to explore the unknown. Since the Moon Race in the 1960s and 1970s, deep-space probes have explored many celestial bodies in our solar system, including eight planets. These explorations have yielded tremendous scientific discoveries, but they also revealed many more unsolved mysteries. The 21st century has witnessed a remarkable increase in deep-space exploration activities, with several new agencies launching their spacecraft in the past few decades. As a result of technological advancement, exploration success rates have improved significantly. A systematic review of frontier scientific questions can provide invaluable references for mission planning strategies and boost scientific discoveries and breakthroughs in the future. In general, these questions are related to three primary scientific subjects: (1) One of the primary scientific objectives of deep-space exploration is to study the origin and evolution of the solar system. From the collapse of the solar nebula to the formation of the planetary system, the solar system has undergone a complex evolutionary process. The components of the current solar system, particularly the residual presolar material, can provide critical information for understanding the initial conditions and evolution of the solar system. The Moon, being the nearest celestial body to Earth, serves as an outpost for exploring other planetary bodies and is especially important for testing deep-space exploration equipment and studying solar system evolution. (2) Another objective of deep space exploration is to better understand the evolution of planetary habitability. The Sun is an important factor affecting habitability, and eruptions of solar activities can have a substantial impact on the space environment of the solar system. The environment of the Earth and other planets has changed dramatically over billions of years of evolution. Although life has only been confirmed on Earth, other celestial bodies might also have had habitable conditions along the evolutionary process. Decoding the evolution of the habitable environment of solar system planetary bodies is of great significance for understanding the formation and evolution of habitable Earth and the origin of life on Earth. (3) Extraterrestrial life detection is a critical scientific topic in deep space exploration, with far-reaching implications for understanding the origin, evolution, and distribution of life in solar and extrasolar systems. The current scientific challenges in the detection of extraterrestrial life primarily involve four aspects: the origin and evolution of life, extraterrestrial habitable environments, life signal identification, and analogy of terrestrial extreme environments. In endeavors to answer these scientific questions, more well-planned deep-space exploration missions are required to collect evidence. In order to outpace opponents in the continuing space exploration endeavor, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the European Space Agency (ESA), and other rising roles have made their ambitious roadmaps. NASA will encourage commercial companies to join future missions through the Artemis program, and has planned missions to explore Venus, asteroids, and icy bodies. The ESA proposed tens of missions in its white paper <italic>Voyage 2050</italic>. In the coming decades, China will lay the groundwork for the International Lunar Research Station through three Chang’e and four Russian Luna missions. Furthermore, Tianwen-2 and Tianwen-3 will return samples from asteroids and Mars, respectively; Tianwen-4 is intended to explore the Jupiter system. The success of these missions will yield unprecedented information for deciphering the mysteries of the solar system and life, as well as considerably expanding our knowledge of the universe we live in.

The history of the ERS–2 satellite is closely linked with that of its predecessor, ERS-1. The first one was launched on July 17, 1991, followed by ERS-2 on April 21, 1995. Both satellites significantly exceeded their original design life of three years, contributing extensively to various scientific and environmental applications during their operational periods. This study focuses on the ERS-2 satellite, whose mission officially ended on September 5, 2011. The final image from ERS-2 was received on July 4, 2011. Subsequently, after executing 66 deorbiting maneuvers, the satellite’s altitude was reduced from 780 km to 573 km to facilitate natural orbital decay due to atmospheric drag. Approximately thirteen years later, on February 21, 2024, ERS-2 completed its atmospheric re-entry over the North Pacific Ocean, between Alaska and Hawaii, at the estimated coordinates 37°24’00.0”N and 151°54’00.0”W, at 18:17 CET (17:17 UTC). The objective of this paper is to evaluate the probability of Earth impact by surviving fragments and to estimate the casualty area resulting from debris. Our analysis assumes that all satellite systems were deactivated, batteries disconnected, fuel purged, and the wind scatterometer folded. Utilizing this baseline and additional data published by ESA in Bulletin83 (1995), we reconstructed the ERS-2 satellite model to perform re-entry simulations using three representative tools: Debris Assessment Software (DAS) developed by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Debris Risk Assessment and Mitigation Analysis (DRAMA) developed by European Space Agency (ESA) and DEBRISK developed by Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES).

The Ulysses mission is a collaborative effort of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to study the Sun's environment, the heliosphere, especially over its polar regions. Mission operations are carried out by a joint multi-national ESA/NASA team located at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. At the time of writing, the nominal date for the end of science mission operations is the end of March 2008, a total mission duration of 17½ years from the launch date of 6th October 1990. Supporting such a long duration mission using the original mission control system is clearly undesirable for a number of reasons: hardware failures, hardware and operating system obsolescence and requirements imposed due to reasons external to the mission or user requests. This paper presents the real-life experiences of the Ulysses flight control team in evolving the Ulysses mission control system (UMCS) to support on-going mission operations. The UMCS is into its third generation and the lessons learned in migrating from the first to the second generation and carried over into the recently completed migration will be discussed in this paper. One example of such a lesson is the need to understand fully the requirements driving the migration and assigning priorities to such requirements. Another is the need to identify the migration paths available and trade them off in terms of risks and costs. One of the major contributors to both successful migrations was the decision to stay with the same operating system family, HP OpenVMS, for the UMCS. Another was that the need for minimal changes to the application code base, modify code to support hardware only, was clearly understood by the user community. A crucial element in migration success was the live comparison testing of the new and old UMCS carried out by the UMCS users, which generated an auditable trail for system validation. This exercise also produced strong confidence among all stakeholders that the new UMCS is even better than the old.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has formed the Advanced Space Transportation Program (ASTP) at the Marshall Space Flight Center to address advanced space transportation technologies. The main focus of the ASTP Office is directed to those technologies that will be needed to reduce the cost of both Earth-toorbit and in-space transportation. The current focus of the advanced reusable technologies (ART) Project is the development of those critical technologies required to enable a rocket-based combined-cycle (RBCC) engine and ultimately an RBCC-based reusable launch vehicle. Additional effort is also being expended to address those associated technologies that would be required to not only support an RBCC-based vehicle but other advanced reusable transportation systems as well. This paper will describe the work that has been performed since the last project status was presented to the 1997 Joint Propulsion Conference.' Currently, NASA and its industry partners are performing ground testing of hydrogen-fueled rocketbased combined-cycle flowpaths. Successful ramjet and scramjet testing at Mach 6 and scramjet testing at Mach 8 have been performed. Cold flow mixing tests have also been successfully performed as have inlet operability tests. Additional testing of RBCC flowpaths at air augmented rocket and rocket only modes is underway. Additional work will be performed on technologies that will support an RBCC-powered launch vehicle and will be focused in the following areas: structures and materials; avionics and operations; propulsion turbomachinery; and thermal protection systems. Chief Engineer, Advanced Reusable Technologies Project, NASA/ MSFC, Senior Member AIAA Project Manager, Advanced Reusable Technologies Project, NASA/MSFC, Member AIAA Copyright © 1998 by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc. No copyright is asserted in the United States under Title 17, U.S. Code. The U.S. Government has a royalty-free license to exercise all rights under the copyright claimed herein for Governmental Purposes. All other rights are reserved by the copyright owner. Introduction The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Advanced Space Transportation Program (ASTP), part of the Space Transportation Program (STP) Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), is focusing on those technologies that will be needed to reduce the cost of both Earth-to-orbit and in-space transportation. NASA's strategy is to advance innovative space transportation technology development through the X-33, X-34, ASTP, and the Future-X programs to enable reduction of these costs. The ASTP consists of three major technology areas: focused, core, and research technologies. The ART project currently manages the work that is covered under NASA Research Announcements 8-16 and 8-21. The project's primary focus over the last 2 years has been on rocket-based combined-cycle (RBCC) technology development activities awarded under NRA 8-16. The current aerospace and academic organizations listed in Figure 1 are performing testing and analysis supporting the RBCC propulsion activities. The engine contractors, Aerojet, Pratt & Whitney, and Rocketdyne are currently either testing or preparing to test their RBCC engine flowpaths. Direct connect testing has been performed at Mach 6 flight conditions in both ramjet and scramjet modes and at Mach 8 flight conditions in the scramjet mode. Testing has also been performed at sealevel static conditions and at Mach 3.4 ramjet conditions.

Dengue, Malaria and Zika are vector-borne diseases caused by mosquitoes that carry the parasites that lead to illnesses. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) hundreds of thousands of people around the world die every year due to disease-transmitting mosquitoes [6]. Mosquito outbreaks occur most commonly in warm climates, in areas close to the equator and tropical regions. Female mosquitoes lay their eggs in the ponds and puddles where water accumulates due to rainfall. In 2016, there was a significant spike in the number of dengue cases in Argentina; there were 79,455 cases of dengue reported in 2016 compared to 3250 cases in 2014 and 4774 in 2015 and went back down to the hundreds in 2017 and rose to thousands again in 2018 [1]. Since Dengue and Zika are spread by the same species of mosquito, Aedes aegypti, [2], the goal of this project is to examine whether the spike in dengue cases in 2016 in Argentina also led to a spike in Zika cases. During this study we will determine if there is a correlation between the number of Zika cases and rainfall precipitation levels. For the analysis, we use available Zika data for Argentina obtained from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) database [8]. More specifically, we are looking at the number of cases per month at a county level in Argentina. The precipitation data is obtained from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) through the Global Precipitation Measurement Mission (GPM) [7]. Just like the Zika data, precipitation data is also on a monthly basis and data is available at a county level. There are existing systems for forecasting the outbreak of vector-borne diseases in various countries and each system looks at a particular factor. For example, the Dengue forecasting MOdel Satellite-based System (D-MOSS) is a system that issues warnings of dengue outbreaks eight months before outbreaks are likely to occur in Vietnam [3]. Another existing early warning system is the Predictive fLUshing Mosquito (PLUM) model. PLUM was developed by Draper Scientists in collaboration with scientists from Boston University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to help predict and decrease outbreaks of dengue fever using observations collected in Singapore, Peru, and Puerto Rico [4]. Our work is inspired by D-MOSS, but instead of including water availability as a component in the prediction and focusing on Vietnam, we are interested in finding out the relationship between Zika outbreaks and precipitation levels in Argentina. The Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations aim to address global problems of peace, justice, gender equality, good health and many others [5]. Similar to how D-MOSS targets these UN Sustainability goals [3], our project aspires to bring a similar approach when dealing with the Zika Virus. We will produce a report of our analysis results and visualizations that can be used by beneficiaries in Argentina to help in the efforts of combating and controlling the spread of Zika virus.

Coastal regions have historically represented a significant challenge for air quality investigations due to water-land boundary transition characteristics and a paucity of measurements available over water. Prior studies have identified the formation of high levels of ozone over water bodies, such as the Chesapeake Bay, that can potentially recirculate back over land to significantly impact populated areas. Earth-observing satellites and forecast models face challenges in capturing the coastal transition zone where small-scale meteorological dynamics are complex and large changes in pollutants can occur on very short spatial and temporal scales. An observation strategy is presented to synchronously measure pollutants 'over-land' and 'over-water' to provide a more complete picture of chemical gradients across coastal boundaries for both the needs of state and local environmental management and new remote sensing platforms. Intensive vertical profile information from ozone lidar systems and ozonesondes, obtained at two main sites, one over land and the other over water, are complemented by remote sensing and in-situ observations of air quality from ground-based, airborne (both personned and unpersonned), and shipborne platforms. These observations, coupled with reliable chemical transport simulations, such as the NOAA National Air Quality Forecast Capability (NAQFC), are expected to lead to a more fully characterized and complete land-water interaction observing system that can be used to assess future geostationary air quality instruments, such as the NASA Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) as well as current low earth orbiting satellites, such as the European Space Agency's Sentinel 5-Precursor (S5-P) with its Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI).

The discovery and exploitation of crude oil in the Niger Delta Region of Nigeria by the various Petroleum Companies have greatly enhanced the nation's economy.However, practices linked to their discovery, growth and production operations have important and detrimental local effects on the ambient atmosphere.A good understanding and quantification of the concentrations of the greenhouse gases in this region including those of CO 2 , CH 4 , O 3 and NO 2 as a by-product of crude oil and pollutants could assist in their mitigation.Thus, this work investigates the anomalous variation of these pollutants and their trends in the Niger Delta region to develop control strategies that will enhance the mitigations leading to air quality improvement in this region of Nigeria.The CH 4 and NO 2 data utilized in this work were sourced from the European Space Agency (ESA) for 10 years from January 2003 to December 2012.The same data period of 10 years was obtained for the tropospheric ozone (O 3 ) concentrations from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), while a data period of six (6) years was obtained for CO 2 concentrations from six (6) experimental sites around the gas-flaring stations in the Niger Delta region from January 2005 to December 2010.However, 17 other sites with no gas-flaring records were selected as the control in both the Northern and Western regions of Nigeria.The analyses of the concentrations of these Pollutants were carried out using a descriptive statistical approach including regression and correlation analysis.The One-Way ANOVA was also utilized in comparing the concentrations of these pollutants in the flare region of the Niger Delta region to those of the non-flare region of Nigeria to be able to determine their statistical significance.The results of analyses showed that CH 4 concentrations were the main contributor to the air pollution problem in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria followed by CO 2 .While for the non-flare stations considered, NO 2 has the highest concentration index aside from CO 2 .

The European Space Agency (ESA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have issued an international announcement of opportunity to solicit scientific investigations for two missions that together constitute the Solar Terrestrial Science Programme (STSP). T h e missions are Cluster, a set of four identical spacecraft that will study basic plasma processes in the earth's magnetosphere, and SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory), a spacecraft to study solar processes and solar‐terrestrial relationships. Proposals are solicited from scientists in the ESA member nations, Canada, and the United States.

Soil moisture (SM) plays an important role in the water and energy exchanges that occur in the terrestrial surface. Soil moisture can be retrieved at a larger scale by using the visible and InfraRed (IR) bands as well as through the microwave remote sensing. Because of very high importance of SM for variety of applications, there are now two dedicated microwave satellites in the Earth’s orbit for soil moisture retrieval from space. The first, Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite has been launched by the European Space Agency in November 2009 and second is Soil Moisture Active and Passive (SMAP) launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in January 2015. In this review, brief background of soil moisture retrieval algorithms are presented with different applications in the area of water resources. The first section provides the introduction of the soil moisture, presents several in situ techniques for measurement of soil moisture and soil moisture retrieval algorithms from visible/IR and microwave remote sensing. Section 2 describes the satellite soil moisture applications in water resources.