The latest European Sentinel satellite went into orbit after taking off from Russia. It will provide data to help emergency services manage their response to natural disasters.Russia on Friday launched the latest Sentinel satellite for the Copernicus initiative, a multi-billion-euro joint project of the European Union and European Space Agency (ESA) to monitor
the earth's atmosphere.
The ESA's Sentinel-5P satellite was launched in a Russian Rokot missile from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome launch pad in the Arkhangelsk region in northwestern Russia.
"The Sentinel-5P satellite is now safely in orbit so it is up to our
mission control teams to steer this mission into its operational
life and maintain it for the next seven years or more," ESA Director General Jan Woerner said.Once operational, the 820 kilogram (1,808-pound) satellite will use state-of-the-art technology to monitor air pollution, UV radiation, and atmospheric gases such as nitrogen dioxide,methane, and carbon monoxide that can contribute to climate change and ozone depletion.Staring down at the earth at a height of 824 kilometers (512miles), the satellite will also be able to identify the worst-affected areas of environmental disasters to help emergency services respond more effectively.
A multi-billion euro effort
It is the sixth Sentinel satellite to be launched since April 2014.
The other five satellites track changes in the earth's oceans and land via advanced radar and optical imagery technology.
In total, the EU and the ESA have promised to spend €8 billion
($9.5 billion) on the Copernicus program, previously known as
the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GEMS)
initiative, until 2020.The program's namesake, Nicolaus Copernicus, was a sixteenth-century Polish astronomer who first concluded that the Earthorbited the sun at a time when many believed the opposite to be true. Extra pounds worse for menAnother of the authors, Richard Peto of Oxford University, said that being obese was far more dangerous for men than it was for women. Obese men have higher fat levels andrisk of diabetes than women with a similar Body Mass Index."The excess risk of premature death is about three times as big for a man who gets fat as for a woman who gets fat," Peto said.A number of recent studies had indicated that obesity might not be as detrimental to life expectancy as previously thought, because of protective benefits that corpulent people enjoyed against certain diseases.The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that some 1.3 billion adults worldwide are overweight, while a further 600 million are obese. In Europe, the prevalence of adult obesity is 20 percent, while the amount rises to 31 percent in North America.Earlier this year,the WHO warned that levels of child obesity were rising at an alarming rate,particularly in developing countries.
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