ESA Declares Flagship Envisat Observing Satellite Lost 39
An anonymous reader writes with news that the European Space Agency has lost contact with its Envisat environmental satellite mere weeks after celebrating a full decade in orbit. Engineers have spent the last month trying to re-establish contact, and will continue to do so for another two months. "With ten sophisticated sensors, Envisat has observed and monitored Earth’s land, atmosphere, oceans and ice caps during its ten-year lifetime, delivering over a thousand terabytes of data. An estimated 2500 scientific publications so far have been based on this information, furthering our knowledge of the planet." The ESA was hoping Envisat would stay operational for another two years, until Sentinel satellites from the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security initiative became operational.
Not EVERYTHING can be a Voyager Spacecraft. (Score:4, Interesting)
BTW - hows that whole ROHS thing working out for you?
(I know, aerospace components have an ROHS waiver, but when we order stuff from Europe and try to use the ROHS waiver they still send us ROHS anyways half the time)
Re:Not EVERYTHING can be a Voyager Spacecraft. (Score:4, Interesting)
Dangerous chemicals, wakalixes, same thing. Your body is full of dangerous chemicals. Just inject yourself with some extra insulin and tell me how it goes. It's 100% natural and comes from your own body!
Where it comes to leaded PCB assemblies, you're wholly and saldy misinformed [sigcon.com]. Non-leaded PCB assemblies have bigger environmental impact due to a confluence of reasons. Any of those reasons by itself is perhaps a minor thing, but when taken together they are quite significant.
Re:Destroyed by climate denialists (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm posting from a low-power PC in an office building with a gray water system and I drive a short commute with 30-40MPG cars. You're the one who's talking about destroying civilization and not doing anything.
I really want to get my PDA onto solar-only just for such posts.