NASA and the Norwegian Mapping Authority are partnering to develop a state-of-the-art satellite laser ranging station 650 miles from the North Pole that will produce high-precision locations of orbiting satellites, help track changes in the ice sheets and improve the efficiency of marine transportation and agriculture.

The Arctic station will be the latest addition to a global network of space geodetic stations, which measure and monitor the size and shape of Earth, its orientation in space, the exact location of points on its surface and how these locations change over time. Space geodesy has a decades-long history at NASA due to its important role in the positioning and navigation of satellites.

“This partnership with Norway is an important step for NASA and the scientific community in building the next generation space geodetic network,” said Benjamin Phillips, program scientist for NASA’s Space Geodesy Program in Washington. “This network provides fundamental data for satellite and spacecraft navigation and underpins many of NASA’s Earth-observing missions and science.”

Under the new agreement signed on Aug. 7, Norway and NASA will build and install a satellite laser ranging facility in the scientific base of Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard. NASA will also provide expert consultation on how to operate the instruments. The ground-based laser transmits ultrashort laser pulses aimed at satellites specially equipped with a retroreflector, an array of special mirrors that bounce the pulses back. The system measures the time it takes for the light to travel back to its point of origin, which is used to determine the position of the satellite with respect to the ground station with an accuracy of around 0.04 inches (1 millimeter).

Combined with measurements from other geodetic instruments at the Ny-Ålesund Geodetic Observatory and all over the globe, the laser ranging observations will help refine the Global Geodetic Reference Frame, the basis for setting coordinates for all locations on Earth’s surface. The reference frame is used to measure the position of objects in space with respect to the Earth, as well as to precisely monitor motions of Earth’s crust, changes in sea level, and to support satellite positioning technology like GPS, which is used in many aspects of our daily lives.

“From the NASA perspective, laser ranging is important to understanding where our spacecraft are, as well as where on Earth their measurements are located,” said Stephen Merkowitz, space geodesy project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Laser ranging is needed for satellites that require very precise positioning measurements. Today we’re tracking over 90 satellites, not only from NASA, but also from other space agencies with this technique.”

The new Norwegian geodetic station will be the northernmost of its kind and will be invaluable for tracking satellites that follow polar orbits, as many of NASA’s Earth-observing missions do.

To make sure the laser ranging system is able to work in Arctic conditions, NASA will use a telescope dome strong enough to open and break the ice that might accumulate on top during Svalbard’s frigid winters. The telescope will be mounted on a pointing gimbal that can still move when exposed to very cold temperatures. To be able to work during the Arctic summertime, when the constant sunlight makes it difficult to observe the stars needed to calibrate the telescope, NASA specified that this telescope has to be stable for months at a time.

The Norwegian Mapping Authority started construction work on the new scientific base in 2014. The current goal is to have all systems in operation by 2022.

“This is a major investment for Norway,” Merkowitz said. “Norwegians are particularly interested in the global applications. They’ve taken a leading role in the advocacy and implementation of many initiatives relevant to space geodesy and its applications towards monitoring climate change.”

“In Svalbard, we’re already seeing the effects of climate change,” said Per Erik Opseth, director of the Geodetic Institute of the Norwegian Mapping Authority in Hønefoss, Norway, the agency working with NASA to develop the new laser ranging system. “Setting up this fundamental station in Ny-Ålesund will help Earth observations from satellites crossing the North Pole, so we can improve our knowledge of ice cap meltdown, sea level rise in this area and also the melt of sea ice in the basin between Russia and North America.”

Continued development of the next-generation space geodetic network that the new station in Svalbard will contribute to is expected to further improve the accuracy of satellite measurements of Earth processes, including changes in polar ice sheets. One such mission is NASA’s upcoming Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite-2, or ICESat-2, designed to measure tiny changes in the elevation of Earth’s ice sheets that indicate ice loss or gain.

“With ICESat-2, we want to measure changes in the ice sheets that are on the order of centimeters per year,” said Goddard’s Scott Luthcke, lead for the ICESat-2 geolocation team. “If we made an error of a few centimeters when positioning the satellite in space with respect to the center of mass of the planet, which is established using geodetic data from the network, that would translate into a very large error in our calculations of the volume change of the ice sheets.”

For more information on NASA’s Geodesy program:

https://space-geodesy.nasa.gov

Banner Image The scientific base of Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard, as seen from the sea. The future Satellite Ranging Station will be located between the two antennas visible in the image.
Credit: Norwegian Mapping Authority/Per Erik Opseth

On 5 April 2017, the Norwegian government proposed an amendment to the Norwegian code of criminal proceedings to allow the police to compel the use of biometric authentication. After two quick debates, the Norwegian Parliament passed the proposition into law on 21 June.

Article 199 of the Norwegian code of criminal proceedings reads as follows after the change:

“When searching an electronic system the police can demand from anyone with connection to the system the necessary information to gain access to the system or open it by biometric authentication.If anyone refuses a demand for biometric authentication as proposed in the first sentence, the police may perform the authentication by force.The decision to use force

If anyone refuses a demand for biometric authentication as proposed in the first sentence, the police may perform the authentication by force.

The decision to use force by the second sentence is decided by the prosecutor’s office. If there is a risk that would be brought about by delaying the authentication, the decision can be made by the police on the spot. The decision shall immediately be reported to the prosecutor’s office.[…]”

The lack of specificity of an “electronic system” means this law has an extremely wide scope. We can, for example, envision that access to a personal device such as a mobile phone, which stores the access credentials to several cloud storage services, essentially gives away a more or less complete description of a person’s life. To entrust such decision to a single police officer with no due process means that an act with very far reaching consequences may be performed in a matter of seconds. EDRi member Electronic Frontier Norway (EFN) is exploring the possibility that this may violate the privacy protections afforded by Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the right to avoid self-incrimination afforded by Article 6.

There is also no reference to proportionality of the use of force. Although there is no reason to suspect this would be used in a disproportionate way, the lack of such a limitation means that we don’t know how far the use force might be taken. While the use of torture is prohibited by the Norwegian constitution, such lack of specificity in an individual law risks creating a situation where an overzealous officer may deem it necessary to perform acts which are prohibited by other parts of the law. It is not obvious how the law may be applied for example when iris scanning is involved. Logically, force must be applied in close proximity to the eyeball and eye socket, which puts an individual at obvious physical risk.

It is also important to take note that the law is not limited to suspects but “anyone with connection to the system”. This means that someone with no connection to a crime may be subjected to the abovementioned uses of force.

EFN is worried about the development this and other changes to the law in the same direction represents. This law has been rushed through without proper justification, and the wording has been chosen with apparently little or no regard to proper scope.

Norwegian code of criminal proceedings (only in Norwegian)
https://lovdata.no/dokument/NL/lov/1981-05-22-25/KAPITTEL_4-3#%C2%A7199

Forced biometric authentication in Norway (26.07.2017)
https://efn.no/1807/forced-biometric-authentication-in-norway

(Contribution by Tom Fredrik Blenning, EDRi member Electronic Frontier Norway)

The world’s first crewless, automated ship will launch in 2018, reports the Wall Street Journal, and is expected to be fully autonomous by 2020. The Norwegian-built Yara Birkeland will use GPS, radar, cameras, and sensors to navigate itself around other boat traffic and dock on its own. It’s anticipated to cost around $25 million, which is about three times as much as a standard container ship of the same size. But investors say without the need for fuel or crew, annual operating costs would be cut by up to 90 percent. The vessel will become autonomous in stages, Yara said.

“Yara Birkeland will initially operate as a manned vessel, moving to remote operation in 2019 and expected to be capable of performing fully autonomous operations from 2020,” the company said in a post on its website from May.

The 100-container Birkeland is being jointly developed by agriculture firm Yara International and technology company Kongsberg Gruppen. It’s been dubbed the “Tesla of the Seas,” and is scheduled in late 2018 to start delivering fertilizer from a production facility to the port of Larvik about 37 miles away.

Yara’s head of production Petter Ostbo told The Wall Street Journal the company would look to invest in bigger ships and use them for longer routes once international regulations are in place for crewless vessels. “Maybe even move our fertilizer from Holland all the way to Brazil,” he said.

Yara said its new vessel will also cut emissions. The company plans to reduce air pollutants while improving road safety by removing up to 40,000 truck journeys in populated urban areas.

“We want to go zero emission,” Ostbo said. “Even if some say climate change is not reality, it’s a business reality because clean sources of energy are more affordable than fossil fuels.”

(N.Sethu)

To improve offshore oil spill preparedness, Norway’s government and the oil industry are building an offshore broadband wireless network.

When oil spills occur, the ability to exchange information quickly between ships, planes, and other actors can greatly limit the damage caused by the spill, according to the Norwegian Coastal Administration. In order to speed up communications in such a scenario, an offshore broadband network is being rolled out in Norway.

The network is being built onboard the vessels and planes that take part in oil spill recovery operations. Norway’s Coastal Administration will install the Maritime Broadband Radio (MBR) system on all its oil recovery vessels, as well as ten additional vessels that have oil recovery equipment onboard.

The Norwegian Clean Seas Association for Operating Companies (NOFO) – made up of oil industry organizations – will install the MBR system on all their oil recovery vessels. The system has already been rolled-out on a surveillance plane that’s a joint initiative between the Coastal Administration, NOFO, and the Norwegian Coast Guard. Three onshore base stations have also been installed, to aid in communications with ships and planes.

The Coastal Administration says this is the world’s first national implementation of maritime broadband communication on ships and planes in public service.

“This is a significant improvement that allows us to communicate with all units participating in an oil recovery mission, and share the data without an internet connection. MBR allows us to respond faster with the right actions,” says Kjetil Aasebø, senior advisor in the Coastal Administration, in a statement.

The MBR system has been developed in cooperation with the Norwegian companies Kongsberg Seatex and Radionor. The system operates in the 5GHz frequency band, and offers speeds up to 15Mbps. Its operational range is in excess of 50km, depending on antenna placement.

This means the radios will work well beyond line-of-sight, greatly improving the practical applications of the technology compared to traditional high-performance data communication equipment used offshore.

An MRB network has a mesh network topology. This means that senders and receivers that are out of reach of each other can use other MBR stations between them as radio relay stations. Consequently, a circling airplane with an MBR station can greatly extend the coverage of the network.

MRB radio stations are hardened for offshore use, and contain no moving parts. As a result, the omnidirectional models can contain up to 60 phased-array solid state antennas. The enclosed signal processing circuitry performs real-time radio beamforming and adaptive power control, in order to provide an optimal signal to users, both those nearby and behind the horizon.

(zdnet)

Major evaluation of country’s research landscape also found that internationalisation was a key area for improvement.

More than a quarter of humanities researchers in Norway have never published, according to the first evaluation of the discipline in the country for 30 years.

The study, which was commissioned by the Research Council of Norway, found that 26 per cent of researchers in the discipline had no publications and, while there were “pockets of excellence” in most areas of the humanities, no research groups or universities “reached the highest levels of international performance”.

Overall, however, the humanities had higher than average publication per academic staff member than the other disciplines in the country, according to the report.

The humanities accounted for 16.8 per cent of Norway’s national publication output and there was a 7.8 per cent increase in publications between 2011 and 2015, it added.

The Evaluation of the Humanities in Norway, which was undertaken by 54 international humanities scholars, assessed 2,300 researchers and 97 research groups in 36 organisations in 2016 and early 2017.

Shearer West, deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Sheffield and chair of the evaluation’s principal committee, said that the high proportion of researchers without publications was probably because research in the country is concentrated at its four big research universities: the University of Oslo, University of Bergen, Norwegian University of Science and Technology and UiT The Arctic University of Norway.

“There are a whole bunch of university colleges and other organisations that were more like teaching colleges that have recently begun to be merged with larger institutions. They don’t have a research culture yet they are expected to do research,” she said.

“In some universities that we looked at, staff had 10 per cent of their time allocated to do research, whereas in other places it was closer to 40 per cent or even 45 per cent.”

PhD students accounted for just one-third of the non-publishing research staff.

She said that the main conclusion of the evaluation was that the government and the university sector must “think more strategically about their priorities in terms of humanities research”.

“We didn’t see a lot of evidence of this,” she said.

The report also highlighted internationalisation as a key area for improvement and found that in many instances research was focused on “Norwegian issues and contexts”.

“In a number of cases, the focus on Norwegian research did not lead to sufficient emphasis on how topics, questions and problems investigated in Norwegian case studies should be related to larger, comparable international phenomena,” the panel found.

It also recommended that researchers should target more internationally leading journals and peer-reviewed books while universities should increase inward and outward mobility of academics.

While some institutions provided funds for staff to spend time abroad during sabbaticals, there was “little evidence” of institutions providing fellowships or opportunities for researchers from other countries to visit and spend time working with their own staff in Norway, according to the study.

(times higher education)