Could solutions to climate change lie in space?

Great post! Unintended benefits from technology development are a strong part of NASA's legacy in general. There are other ways NASA and the environment intersect- here's an article written by space policy folks at NASA: http://www.scientificameric[…]?id=nasa-and-climate-change

 

Thanks Delia for the greatarticle.

I also wanted to share my friend's response to the post. This is actually the friend who I mentioned in the first paragraph:

I always like to mention GPS (even though it is a USAF program) for it's importance in fusing data together, creating tools for smarter fleet management, more efficient airways, etc. It also plays a role in making the power grid more functional, but there are opportunities to be had around further optimization of that through better data fusion.

On the more NASA centric side, the majority of the world's environmental monitoring satellites are developed either by NASA or with significant NASA expertise at the table. Data from these systems are already being used for smarter management of natural and agricultural resources, but there is opportunity for progress on this front. The A-Train (http://www.nasa.gov/[…]/a-train.html) satellites are an interesting group to look up that are focused on telling us how the Earth is changing over time.

In my opinion the coolest thing about these technologies is that they are basically just waiting for a commercial organization to license them and launch some monitoring satellites of their own so they can sell the data and planning services to agriculture firms, governments and others. Commercialization has already occurred with imaging satellites, and the next step in this evolution is for wide spread adoption of privately operated environmental satellites. Cisco has started looking at getting into this business.

On another note, I would argue that planetary science is an important step in better understanding how the Earth works. If we learn more about the environmental cycles and mechanisms at work (or not at work) on other planets, we will be better prepared to make sense of the data we collect about the Earth. There is a reason that JPL plays a significant role in both planetary exploration and earth science.

Now for a couple of things from the future: Space Based Solar Power is going to be a big deal. Imagine a satellite that uses square miles of solar panels to generate huge amounts of electricity that is beamed down to the Earth to power the grid. Oddly, it might be less expensive to deploy such a system from the moon, built from materials on the moon, than from the surface of the Earth.

The last thing I want to include is the field of planetary protection. It is a real field in space science and engineering that is focused on developing ways to protect our planet from a catastrophic asteroid impact. Statistics guarantee that the Earth will experience on of these collisions in the future, but we have no way to know when this will occur. This field still gets a little bit of the "giggle factor" but the people who study the problem are serious about it.