Envisat Update 2006: Public Safety
ESA TV Exchanges
Envisat, launched on 28 February 2002, is the biggest European satellite ever built. In mid-2006, ESA asked leading scientists to assess the achievements so far.
This is the second in a series of two Exchanges on this subject, the first one being Envisat Update - Climate Change.
The interview comments, together with new Envisat imagery and animations plus background footage, cover Envisat achievements in the field of public safety.
The soundbites are in English plus in the B-roll, in the scientists' mother tongue.
The scientists include:
Fabio Rocca, Politecnico di Milano
Barry Parsons, University of Oxford
Johnny Johannessen, Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Centre, Norway
The Exchange is made of an A-roll of 4 minutes with English voiceover (split audio) plus a B-roll with clean international sound.
The A-roll script script is online as a PDF file under http://television.esa.int/photos/EbS48963.pdf
A WMV preview file is online under http://esat

ENVISAT ñ PUBLIC SAFETY
10:00:40 Voice over: Since its launch in 2002 Envisat, Europeís environmental satellite, has played a key role in Earth observation. Envisat is the largest Earth observation satellite ever built. It has nine instruments on board and offers a unique synergy between radar and optical observation. Nearly 1,000 scientific projects currently use Envisat, and the number is rising at a rate of 20 or 30 a month. These include commercial and environmental projects as well as studies for public safety.
Envisat is used to monitor threats to public safety from pollution disasters. For example, a system know as global mapping, which monitors the shifts of pollution in the atmosphere, and which was developed as a result of Envisatís sophisticated instrumentation, observed the effects of forest fires in Canada reaching the atmosphere above Europe.
Observations from Envisat are used to predict floods and landslides, and because of Envisatís ability to observe minute ch