Source: Tonic
While other space agencies shoot for the moon, Brazil's National Institute for Space Research has its sights set on more earthly matters, such as climate change and deforestation in the Amazon.
You might wonder what a country famous for its crime and favelas is doing in outer space. Jupiter's big red beauty mark can't possibly be a more urgent concern than Rio holdups and cliffside shantytowns sliding into sewers. Gilberto Câmara, General Director of Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (INPE), knows this better than most. Saving the earth from itself is the reason the Institute took to space in the first place."We are not concerned about astronauts. We are not concerned about the moon. We are not concerned about Jupiter," Câmara said to a group of journalists gathered at INPE headquarters outside Sao Paulo last Friday. "We are concerned about the Earth."
It's not exactly what you'd expect to hear from the director of Brazil's space research effort. Câmara isn't a typical government official. Overseeing a program with a $400 million annual budget, Câmara talks openly, sometimes disparagingly, about his country's previous forays into space.
"Astronauts are a waste of money, a complete waste of money," Câmara says when asked about Marcos Pontes, the first and only Brazilian to reach space. Pontes flew to the International Space Station in 2006 where he conducted eight experiments chosen by the Brazilian Space Agency (BAE), INPE's more human-friendly sister program.
"It was a $50 million waste of public money," Câmara says.
The modern astronaut is little more than a useless vestige of the Cold War, Câmara believes. "There's nothing a man can do in space that a satellite cannot do better," he says. "There's no contribution to innovation and technology from manned flight. It is a self-contained world. It only serves the purpose of maintaining what Eisenhower called the industrial military complex of the United States and its counterparts in Europe, China and Australia." The International Space Station, Câmara says, "has shored up billions of dollars, but if you think what is coming out of it, it is nothing."
Câmara barks loud, but some wonder about his bite. INPE doesn't currently have a working earth-monitoring satellite in the skies. CBERS-2B, a joint venture with China, went offline in April after running out its expected 2-year lifetime. INPE now relies on images and data relayed by satellites operated by other countries.
Still, the same monitoring system hailed by Science in 2007 as the "envy of the world" hums at INPE headquarters today. Soon, data gathered by satellites such as the US Landsat-5 and India's ResourceSat-1 will fly through one of the fastest computers in the world. Just weeks after CBERS-2B became space junk, INPE purchased a $20 million Cray XT6 supercomputer to simulate atmospheric phenomena and forecast climate change. Along with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of Edinburgh, INPE is one of only a handful of organizations to own an XT6.Brazil should have its next satellite in the skies in October 2011. That's when CBERS-3 is set to launch from China. INPE plans to launch another optical land imaging satellite, Amazonia-1, in 2012. If Câmara has his way, at least 11 more earth-monitoring satellites will be launched between 2014 and 2020. Brazil's sustained development as an emerging world power depends on it, he says.
"Our mantra is that space technology adds value to Brazil's 'natural knowledge-economy,'" Câmara says of INPE, referring to a popular 2008 report written by Kristin Bound and published by UK think-tank Demos. In its quest to become a leader in innovation and the first developed nation in the tropics, Brazil must do more than just exploit its vast natural resources, the report claims. The country must develop a scientific understanding of what's within its borders and then turn that knowledge into a marketable international resource.
Brazil already leads the world in sugarcane research, publishing more than twice as many scientific articles on the biofuel crop than any other nation. The country's advances in hydroelectricity and ethanol have given renewable energy a staggering 47 percent share of the country's energy matrix. The United States, by contrast, gets just 7 percent of its energy from renewable sources. Still, as advanced as Brazil is in many ways, the country is far behind in others. Most glaringly, the government has very little control over more than half the land within its border. Comprised of nine states and taking up 61 percent of Brazil's total area, the Legal Amazon is still very much wild, in both the positive and negative sense.
INPE is doing what it can to tame the wilderness in its northern half, or at least monitor it. Câmara is credited with setting up the free online dissemination of 270,000 CBERS images and leading one of the most advanced deforestation monitoring projects in the world. INPE's Program for the Estimation of Deforestation in the Amazon (PRODES) superimposes images of the entire Legal Amazon taken by satellites such as NASA's Landsat and the private satellites in the Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC) to determine how much rainforest has been destroyed over a given period of time. PRODES is used primarily to evaluate environmental policy and to raise public awareness about deforestation.DETER, another INPE program, is faster than PRODES and provides color-coded images taken by NASA's MODIS Terra and Aqua satellites. When used as designed, DETER can serve as a warning system to direct law enforcement to locations on the ground under threat of deforestation.
Both PRODES and DETER have major shortcomings. Both catch deforestation only after it occurs, when trees as old as 1,000 years old have already been trucked away to sawmills. And each is rendered completely useless in the presence of cloud cover, which blankets most of the Amazon during the May-October rainy season. Câmara hopes to soon have a cloud-cutting radar satellite in INPE's arsenal — the Institute has already designed it — but the Brazilian government hasn't yet allocated the roughly $300 million needed build and send it into orbit.
Perhaps most concerning, there is little cooperation between INPE and law enforcement or policy makers.
Dalton de Morisson Valeriano, INPE's Coordinator of Remote Sensing, says he asks the Brazilian Environment Institute (IBAMA) to report back on ground conditions after he delivers DETER maps highlighting active trouble spots. "We haven't gotten anything back in five years of asking for that information," he says.
To be fair, at a given time, IBAMA employs only 700-800 officers on the ground and no more than six helicopters in the skies above the fifth largest nation in the world. And the Amazon is rough country. "Even if you have a beautiful Land Rover, it's going to break quickly," Valeriano says of maintaining equipment in a region known for having some of the worst roads in the world. "There's an [IBAMA] office with 3 Land Rovers and 2 are broken," he says.Câmara is also aware of the challenges facing his agenda, and he's adjusted his expectations accordingly. "Space agencies and researchers can provide information about what is happening. What they cannot do is enforce policy."
In his spare time, Câmara teaches a graduate course in Earth Systems Science at INPE headquarters. A dozen Brazilian twenty-somethings waited outside the conference room as journalists kept the Institute's director captive inside. "My students are probably worrying about me," he said after we stole 20 minutes from his class. "I have to go." The emerging natural knowledge-economy churns on.
"We are running an experiment with ourselves and we don't know where it's going to lead," Câmara says of earth. "We are the final frontier."