And from out there we see how illuminated the earth is at night looks lovely but like pollution is a huge problem. Earth obit has become a crowded superhighway theyre currently around five thousand satellites circling other planets and less than half of them are still operational. Not surprisingly most were launched by the united states. China is in second place having overtaken russia. Now a whole new generation of satellites is on the move in small sats. Tom. The thirty nine year old lives in berlin and has an offbeat profession. I didnt i always wanted to do something out of the ordinary. Youve got to have a visual youve got to tell yourself thats my goal. Nine years ago ziggurat and two student friends founded berlin Space Technologies theyre ending high their products are meant to go into orbit. The Company Makes miniature satellites packed with cameras and sensors for observing the earth from space. A daring idea. Yet within a few years the startup was celebrating its first major success. In twenty fifteen berlin Space Technologies first satellite was launched in india. The Company Earned three Million Euros with the kent ridge one satellite contract a Singapore University projects to monitor the earths surface. But there were some hair raising minutes shortly after lift off. To concentrate us up to the month amidst all the excitement someone in singapore put the plug on the wrong antenna that meant that for the first couple of hours after launch we couldnt hear the satellite. But all the identified the problem and replug the antenna everybody in the team heaved a huge sigh of relief but it was. The indian triumph brought say god and his team instant recognition it made them full fledged members of the young space Tech Community thats currently shaking up the sectors establishment. Conventional satellites can be the size of a camper van they can take years to build and cost billions brylin Space Technologies is approaching the business from a different angle. The Company Makes small satellites built from tried and trusted mass produced components like camera lenses from a standard camera the Berlin Company modifies them to their own. Requirements there are satellite cost around five Million Euros you could build fifty of them for the cost of a normal large satellite. Demand for small cheap satellites is growing rapidly silicon valleys Big Data Companies have long dreamed of around the clock aerial surveillance of the surface but conventional satellites are stationed so far above the earths surface that their Image Resolution is generally not very high. Satellites like those made by berlin Space Technologies are designed for a much lower orbits and offer resolution of under one meter per pixel. A network string of these small devices could monitor the earths surface twenty four hours a day and with prices so low launching a swarm of them has become an affordable option. The berlin satellites could help contribute to a system like that but what would building it mean for us would it allow constant blanket monitoring of everyone on the planet. So i believe. There are a lot of questions surrounding satellites as orbiting Surveillance System or sea on ethical questions questions of being observed. Thus the honest answer has to be that there are technologies that are definitely more dangerous than our satellites. And that doesnt make them harmless but drones for example are far more dangerous for each of us as individuals and the thoughtless stiffish bios ones at least because regardless of the size of a satellite ours are roughly the size of a washing machine you can still know only get resolutions of around one meter of pixels. So a car would be four pixels and the house maybe ten by ten. And you couldnt see any people so you couldnt be identified concluded that if you were. But the small satellite can still take images of a range of activities on the surface and that information can be used for good but also less wholesome purposes. Thats not stopping sea got from expanding his business hes building a production plant in india that will soon produce over one hundred low cost satellites a year. The whole process has been more or less automated. A satellite for the right year and road be assembled before its been moved out over their. Satellites rolling off the production line like cars something no ones ever managed before if the plan works out itll be a huge breakthrough for berlin Space Technologies. As we think about how i think we have a very good chance of playing in the top tier in the industry simply because not many have the confidence to do it. There arent a lot of people who say hey weve just got to change Space Exploration and get involved in serial production. The small berlin startup isnt just playing around and it could end up changing own our lives. Satellites can make out a lot from out that like the heart shaped island of can trace it for example or individual animals like these flamingos in mozambique. They can read messages directed at the sky. And to pinpoint unusual places like this graveyard for aircraft in arizona. And what else can all the Surveillance States of the useful here are five examples. Example number one. Twenty sixteen the village of b. B. B. Northern uganda was barely visible from space surrounded by grassland it was home to just a handful of people then suddenly that changed dramatically. In neighboring south sudan the civil war flared up again. As many as three thousand south sudanese fled across the border every day towards biddy biddy. That. Within a few months the ugandan government built dozens of new roads dwellings hospitals and schools. Biddy pretty soon became a city today its home to about two hundred ninety thousand people. In. The tiny farming village has been transformed into the Worlds Largest refugee camp. Thanks to satellites governments can track the numbers a movement of refugees and send help where its needed if they want to. Example number two. Satellites can also see things that are otherwise hidden from view these images from north korea reveal that New Buildings have gone up at a facility in her home that manufactures Ballistic Missile components suggesting the countrys Nuclear Weapons program may not be on hold after all the construction evidently continued even after north Korean Leader kim jong un had met with u. S. President donald trump in june twenty eight hundred and committed to denuclearizing the korean peninsula. Example number three. Governments spy on other countries for many reasons. It can be useful. To assess the state of the oil reserves to do that they monitor oil tanks and look at the shadows cast within their rims. The tanks are floating roofs that rise and fall with the oil level. Here theres no shadow because the tank is full and the roof is right near the top. But here the satellite image shows the tank is nearly empty the larger the shadow the lower the oil level. Not just governments but also investors can benefit from such information it can be worth a fortune on the stock market. Example number four. Major retail chains Higher Companies to carry out such a light surveillance of the competition focusing on their parking lots over a period of months a program counts the number of cars in order to determine which locations are doing the most business. With that data a retailer can figure out in what city and in which part of the city its Worth Building a new store. Example number five. To seventy percent of the earths surface is covered with water the oceans are home to countless fish. Nearly eighty million tons of fish end up on our plates every year its estimated that twenty percent of that is caught illegally. Monitoring the oceans directly would be far too expensive instead governments that n. G. O. S use satellite images to identify unregistered trawlers. Speed. Of the trip and patterns of movement or provide indications of whether a boat is carrying tourists or fisherman. Once a troll has been ident. Fide analysts can check whether or not its registered. Satellites can be employed for spying or to save lives and protect the environment it all depends on who is using them and to what end. If you from space reveals a night time that glows with artificial light. And Light Pollution is on the rise. Here we see how much illumination in india crew over a five year period. According to a study more than eighty percent of the worlds population lives under a light polluted night sky. What does this loss of darkness mean for the world. All night it is eventually small owed by the darkness in which it was born. A space time humanity. In the words of german poet reiner maria rybka the darkness from whence i came. The days clamor and demands everything looks different after night falls. Just as a model it was this is a model of our sun and i use it to explain on the one hand how a star actually functions at a star is and on the other to show the size of our planet as compared to it or that im holding the sun i am now with the earth in my pocket is there if thats how small it is compared to the sun was cold see that so. Astronomy is the most ancient of all the sciences. The first calendars were based on what we see in the sky which also seemed to hold the secrets of creation that night we see stars that are millions of white years away but the night is disappearing says Manuel Philip from the rosenheim planetarium. The physicist has set up a star park in the Bavarian Alps a protected dark zone where you can still view the firmament its a sight most of humanity now rarely sees. Of it fresh on its once only twenty to thirty percent of us still see the night sky as it really is a sleepy other seventy to eighty percent of us cant see it like this anymore simply because of the vast increase in artificial lights its behind creasing the swamp in the night sky for the last ten to twenty years and lift consists of think. Primeval rhythms of light and darkness have been suspended in major cities the worlds Biggest Urban Centers are now forty times brighter than the night sky. The seventeenth century invention of Street Lighting lights out the entire planet. And nights are growing over two percent brighter every year. Artificial light is a harmful a mission that has encountered killable effects on ecosystems. Then if theres not enough darkness it changes things but you get a breeding earlier they start singing earlier trying to lose their leaves later insects fly into the artificial light and fly in circles around street lamps until they die of exhaustion or overrun germany various studies have documented the damage they show that german street lights kill a billion insects every night a billion. Every night. Banishing darkness its a very sick human instinct. Anything can happen and darkness thats where monsters tread. The dead to come back to life at night and the world is their domain until dawn breaks again but the reality is that by lighting everything up we also cast shadows. Weve taken the first steps toward space which is also darkness incarnate full of dark matter and dark energy ninety five percent of the universe remains a mystery yet on a tiny speck in all this vastness weve convinced ourselves that we are luminaries. Youre hearing is all right here in the spiral galaxy this is where we all live where im putting this little crumb about half way in from the edge towards the center thats where our solar system is without the sun and the planets circling it. German philosopher Emmanuel Kant said two things struck him with all his moral imperative and the story heavens the unfathomable within and the incomprehensible above. The night is time that cant be used effectively a time of rest that has a beauty all the time. And theres the cliche of a riotous night life im sure but the harsh reality of the day requires a counterpart an intoxicating darkness the power and the poetry of the night. The earth is made up of one hundred eighteen chemical elements that everything on our planet all matter originated in space. So its not a metaphor to say that we are indeed made from star dust. Is simply false the model he had to call we having come from space where part of space isnt this but isnt that what i usually say if someone asks me about it is that we on the earth are not in the universe the universe is within us so not as we be as one is in ones been. Estimates say there are a billion trillion stars out there and it would be tragic for us to lose sight of the. Dutch painter Vincent Van Gough perhaps said it best when he commented that in the moments that he felt overcome by piety he went outside to paint the stars. More than a third of people on earth never get a glimpse of the milky way due to Light Pollution we asked on facebook for your views on the topic does artificial lines equal progress or do we need to literally take back the night. I even writes it makes me sad and i worry most of all about the animals that are affected. Here on from the philippines calls it a side effect of our Technological Capabilities but he says we must do something to limit Light Pollution in the atmosphere. Here not a come unstuck hest actually in venezuela we dont have this problem because our lights have gone out. Cloudy i feel sorry for people who cant see the milky way in all its splendor shes fortunate enough to see it all year long from her home in chile. Thank you for all your comments. Documents and tonight theres lots of it out there in the universe and most of it is still a mystery to us such as the incredibly bright of gamma rays emitted by pulse outs for example a new telescope is going to push the on the left of what we know its there to cover the gamma ray spectrum and measure fame with great precision the cutting edge device is located on the perma in the Canary Islands. Something cosmic is being built here the large sized telescope number one is forty five meters tall and has a diameter of twenty three meters the structure is made of ultra light reinforced carbon fiber and steel tubes the mirrors are also light which allows the telescope to be rotated and tipped in any direction in a matter of seconds scientists at the Max Planck Institute of physics in munich are playing a leading role in the project in the institutes garden theyve set up a large scale model to test their design. Its in Astrophysics Laboratory under the open sky. We tested several different configurations for attaching the mirrors to the carbon fiber structure. And also when we design a new instrument that we say want to put the dish we build it here first and two for physics and then we attach it to the structure to make sure that it works such that when we quite a lot. We just put it on. A team of one hundred International Scientists spent three years working on the four hundred million euro project the giant telescope observes low Energy Gamma Rays that reach the earths atmosphere. The gamma rays can be generated in various ways for example by a supernova or exploding star in distant galaxies. The gamma rays travel through the vast reaches of time in space on their way to earth. David greene was the ration of the first prototype in love palma on the Canary Islands and. There was a half of a party and a half of a. Difficult so everyone was very excited and very happy that the telescopes were far file of the first telescope is finally done. We all kind of also realized theres a lot of work ahead that the data is right out correctly that the camera works all correctly that everything works for. A large sized telescope will help provide scientists with a new window on to distant reaches of the universe its part of a Global Initiative to build the Worlds Largest gamma ray observatory. The optics now solar system are constantly in motion and yet they dont fly upon us thanks to gravitation gravity has made life on earth possible because it keeps our atmosphere from leaking out into space. But gravity isnt the same all over the planet we have a question about that sent in by a viewer from there ok. Why does your weight differ according to where you measure it. In seeking to answer that question lets first look at the earths gravitational field. Even though it might look like one planet earth is not a perfect sphere its mouse is distributed an evenly both on the earths surface and in its core where mass is more heavily concentrated gravity is stronger than in places where it is less dense. Satellites can measure the distribution of density in the planet and they reveal fluctuations in the earths gravitation. They show that the earths gravity field looks more like a potato than a sphere in this model gravitation is stronger in the areas that protrude and it has a lesser effect in the deps the satellites found the deepest indentation close to Southern India if our friend peter usually weighs in at eighty kilos he would weigh twenty four grams less their. Gravity also sinks according to a locations distance from the center of the earth. Thats why peter weighs a bit more at a low lying beach. Than on a mountain thats thousands of metres high but he wont notice the difference. Movement also influences your weight anyone whos taken a ride on a carousel knows that the faster it turns the higher