The latest opening from the ESA Archives deals with material that dates back some 30 years, to 1992 and the International Space Year, and to the beginnings of a coordinated European approach to Earth observation for environmental protection.
The ISY was a worldwide celebration of space cooperation and discovery, first proposed by US Senator Spark Matsunaga of Hawaii and endorsed in 1989 by the UN. It was planned for 1992 as the 500th anniversary of the 1492 discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus, with the objectives of enhancing international collaboration, enhancing public awareness of the benefits of space activities (particularly Earth observation data for research) and demonstrating the usefulness of space technology for better understanding key environmental problems.
The most significant European contribution, jointly organised by the Commission of the European Communities, ESA and the German Space Agency DARA , consisted of a one-week conference on Space in the service of the changing Earth, held from 30 March to 4 April 1992 in Munich. The event was chaired by the former Chairman of ESA Council Hubert Curien, then French Minister for Research and Technology and Chairman of the SAFISY organising body for the ISY (to complete a year of space commitments, Curien would also go on to chair the 1992 meeting of ESA Council at Ministerial Level, held from 9-10 November). It was made up of five different ‘symposia’: a central symposium on environment observation and climate change modelling through international space projects; and a series of smaller satellite symposia. It resulted in the ISY series of proceedings, six references in total, which were published by the ESA Publications Division. The first three of these are volumes 1 to 3 of ISY-1, related to the central symposium, and comprise this opening:
- Vol 1: Remote Sensing for Global Change, Climate Change and Atmosphere & Ocean Forecasting
- Vol 2: Remote Sensing for Environmental Monitoring and Resource Management
- Vol 3: Earth Observation Space Programmes, SAFISY Activities, Strategies of International Organisations, Legal Aspects
In their entirety, they amount to over 1 500 pages documenting the 279 papers delivered over the week as part of eight Session Groups, covering 35 further sub-topics. Over a quarter of these papers come under Sessions C2 and C5, on remote sensing for climate change and on Earth observation space programmes, providing an important chapter in the history of climate change and Earth observation, four years after the formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to collate evidence on climate change and in the same year as the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, where the United Framework Convention on Climate Change was agreed.
At European level, the conference came hot on the heels of a 1991 Report by the European Commission, The European Community Crossroads in Space, following efforts already underway since the late 1980s towards a coherent European approach to the development of its space activities and its collaboration with ESA, and in the light of emerging opportunities for the application of space technologies, such as Earth observation for environmental monitoring.
The advisory panel, comprising ESA representatives Jean-Jacques Dordain and Erich Slachmuylders, was chaired by another familiar name – ESA’s first Director General Roy Gibson, at that time also Head of a Commission Task Force for the European Environment Agency (EEA). Its findings noted the absence of an overall European strategy for Earth observation, “for the EC... the most important of future space activities” and concluded that space for the environment was a priority. The panel recommended the Commission to initiate discussions, “between all concerned with the further development of Europe's Earth observation capabilities, and examine ways of achieving a light and flexible European coordination aimed at deriving maximum benefit from available facilities, data and information”.
Correspondingly, the ISY material also offers valuable insight into the origins of remote sensing within ESA (less than one year after the launch of ERS-1, the first environmental monitoring satellite developed by ESA, itself the subject of one of the sub-sessions) and the start of a traceable timeline of missions and activities that the Agency continues to pursue today, from Meteosat through Envisat to today’s Copernicus Programme (headed by the European Commission).
The idea of inheritance, of course, underpinned the whole conference. One of the opening lectures, the Age of Discovery by Juan Pérez-Mercader, took its audience on a journey from the sixteenth-century mapping and circumnavigations of Columbus, Magallen, and Vespucci to their twentieth century counterparts, exploring the Earth from a very different perspective and investigating space itself. A fitting way to set the scene for the opening lecture of the conference and, beyond the pure science, demonstrating the value of this material as a resource for understanding the cooperative landscape of the time and the philosophical framework within which the conference was conceived.
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Read more about the ISY collection