Nature:
A fleet of satellites first launched in 2006 has been providing
valuable weather forecast and climate model data by picking up
radio signals from GPS satellites. The signals get bent as they
pass through Earth's atmosphere, and the amount of bending
indicates atmospheric temperature and moisture levels. But the
Constellation Observing
System for Meteorology, Ionosphere, and Climate is aging,
and its expensive successor, the government-funded
Joint Polar Satellite
System (JPSS), which has already exceeded its planned
budget, is not due to go up until 2016. To fill the gap, a
commercial operation called
GeoOptics is proposing the
more budget-friendly
Community Initiative
for Cellular Earth Remote Observation (CICERO), a network
of 24 microsatellites. Costing $150 million, compared with
$12.9 billion for JPSS, CICERO would be built and launched with
private funds; any data gathered would then be licensed to US
government agencies and thus made freely available to
researchers. "I would like to put the government out of the
business of doing routine measurements and observations that
could easily be done by a commercial company," said Conrad
Lautenbacher, chief executive of GeoOptics.
