what is most important natural resource. betting checking how much will they be able to play and who will win their store we believe that renewable energy will play an important role in the future. of. the jew politically. starting moggi t. w. welcome to tomorrow today the science show on d w coming up and look down at the air what does the view from space reveal satellites in the sky and there are more and more of them circling up planets. now at birdland stars have is hoping to launch many more small satellites into orbit. and from out

there we see how illuminated the face at night looks lovely but like pollution is a huge problem. earth although it has become a crowded superhighway there currently around five thousand satellites circling on the planet and less than half of them are still operational. not surprisingly most were launched by the united states. china is in second place having another take in russia. now a whole new generation of satellites is on the move to small sats. the thirty nine year old lives in berlin and has an offbeat profession help i've always wanted to do something out of the ordinary. you've got to have a vision you've got to tell yourself that's my goal. nine years ago ziggurat

and two student friends founded berlin space technologies they're 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 trashy 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 earth's surface. but there were some hair raising minutes shortly after lift off. to come so for the month amidst all the excitement someone in singapore put the plug in the wrong

antenna that meant that for the first couple of hours after launch we couldn't hear the satellite that's on the but we identified the problem then 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 that's 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 their 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 valley's big data companies have long dreamed of round the clock aerial surveillance of the surface but conventional satellites are stationed so far above the earth's 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 networked string of these small devices could monitor the earth's 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.

there are a lot of questions surrounding satellites orbiting surveillance or status on ethical questions questions of being observed in the us the honest answer has to be that there are technologies that are definitely more dangerous than our satellites. that doesn't make them harmless but drones for example are far more dangerous for each of us as individuals and the. bio's ones at least because regardless of the size of a satellite ours are roughly the size of a washing machine you can still mainly get resolutions of around one meter of pixels. so a car would be four pixels at the house maybe ten by ten. and you couldn't see any people so you couldn't be identified that you are. a small satellite can still take images of a range of activities on the surface and that. mation can be used for good but also

less wholesome purposes. that's not stopping sea got from expanding his business he's 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. the supply for the right year and road be assembled before it's been moved out over their. satellites rolling off the production line like cars something no one's ever managed before and if the plan works out it will 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 aren't a lot of people who say hey we've just got to change space exploration and get

involved in serial production. the smaller berlin start up isn't just playing around and it could end up changing all our lives. satellites can make out a lot from out that like the hotel island of gallus knocking tracy for example or individual animals like these flamingos in mozambique. they can read messages directed at the sky. and 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. zero it may twenty sixth in the village of northern uganda was barely visible from space surrounded by grassland it was home to just. 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 biddy soon became a city today it's home to about two hundred ninety thousand people in. the tiny farming village has been transformed into the world's largest refugee camp . thanks to satellites governments can track the numbers a movement of refugees and send help where it's 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 hum home that manufactures ballistic missile components suggesting the country's 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. the government spy on other countries for many reasons. it can be useful to assess the state of their 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 there's 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 one. major retail chains higher companies to carry out satellite surveillance of the competition focusing on that 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 parts of the city it's worth

building a new store. for. example number five. seventy percent of the earth's 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 it's 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 the direction of the trip and patterns of movement or provide indications of whether a boat is carrying tourists or fisherman. once a troll has been identified analysts can check whether or not its registered. satellites can. the implied for spying or to save lives and protect the environment

it all depends on who is using them and to what end. the view from space reveals a night time that glows with us official 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 world population lives under a light polluted night sky. what does this loss of darkness mean for the world. all life has eventually swallowed by the darkness in which it was born. space time humanity. in the words of german poet reiner

maria riva the darkness from whence i came. the days clamor and demands everything looks different after night falls. buses and models what this is a model of our son and i use it to explain on the one hand how a star actually functions what a star is and on the other to show the size of our planet as compared to it on the m one of the sun i am now with the earth in my pocket that's 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 it's a sight most of humanity will rarely see. of it fresh on its once only twenty to thirty percent of us still see the night sky as it really is asleep other seventy to eighty percent of us can't see it like this anymore simply because of a vast increase in artificial light it's been increasingly swamping the night sky for the last ten to twenty years at least it consists of think that. primeval rhythms of light and darkness have been suspended in major cities the world's 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 there's not enough darkness it changes things begin to breeding earlier they start singing earlier trays 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 in a. bad darkness it's a very sick human instant. anything can happen and darkness it's where monsters tread. the dead 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. we've 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 we've convinced ourselves that we are luminaries . here and is all right here in the spiral galaxy this is where we all live where i'm putting this little crumb about half way in from the edge towards the center that's well a solar system is without the sun and the planets circling it was. 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 can't be used effectively time of rest that has a beauty all of. us. then there's the cliche of a riotous night life on shifts 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 man everything on our planet all matter originated in space. so it's not a matter for you to say that we are indeed made from stardust. this simply shows

the mahi you had to call me having come from space where part of space isn't this but isn't that what i usually say if someone asks me about it is that we and the earth are not in the universe the universe is within us so not as we have as one is in the and. testament say there are a billion trillion stars out there and it would be tragic for us to lose sight of them. 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 like 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. the one 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 and suck has to clean in venezuela we don't have this problem because our lights have gone out. cloudy i feel sorry for people who can't see the milky way in all its splendor she's fortunate enough to see it all year long from her home in chimney. thank you for all your comments. darkness and light there's a lot of that out there in the universe and most of it is still a mystery to us such as the incredibly bright bursts of gamma rays emitted by pulse

us for example a new telescope is going to push the of that of what we know it's specialized to cover the gamma rays spectrum and measure thanks sources with great precision the cutting edge device is located on the perma in the canary islands. something cosmic is being built here the large size telescope number one is forty five meters tall and has a diameter of twenty three meters this 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 institute's garden they've set up a large scale model to test their design. it's an astrophysics laboratory

under the open sky and. 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 in mark's point institute for physics and then we attach it to the structure to make sure that it works such that when we fly to la palma 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 earth's atmosphere the gamma rays can be generated in various ways for example by a supernova or exploding star in distant galaxies. like gamma rays travel through vast reaches of time in space on their way to earth. david greene was at the inauguration of the first prototype in love palma on the canary

islands and i know that. 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 that the first telescope is finally done. but we all kind of also realize that there's a lot of work ahead and that the data is a read 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 it's part of a global initiative to build the world's largest gamma ray observatory. the objects in our solar system are constantly in motion and yet they don't 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 isn't the same all over the planet we have a question about that sent in by a viewer from iraq. why does your weight differ according to where you measure it. in seeking to answer that question let's first look at the earth's gravitational field. even though it might look like one planet earth is not a perfect sphere its mass is distributed an evenly both on the earth's 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 earth's

gravitation. they show that the earth's gravity field looks more like a potato than a sphere in this model gravitation is stronger in the areas that protrude and that 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 there. gravity also sinks according to a locations distance from the center of the earth. that's why peter weighs a bit more at a low lying beach. than on a mountain that's thousands of metres high but he won't notice the difference. movement also influences your weight anyone who's taken a ride on a carousel knows that the faster it turns the higher you fly because centrifugal force is counteracting the effects of gravity. at the equator the earth

turns more quickly than elsewhere because the centrifugal force is greater there peter would weigh four hundred grams less than at the earth's poles. in space the differences are much more dramatic on the moon peter could leap much higher he would only way a sixth of what he does back on earth. while on the gas giant jupiter he would be two and a half times as heavy. if outlook is read write out the latin phrase. to you have a science question that you've always wanted answered it we're happy to help out yes send it to us as a video text ovoid well if we answer it on the show or send you a little surprise as a thank you can i just ask. interested in more stories from the world of

science go to our website or find us on twitter on facebook. that's all for this week next time we'll be looking into our body's internal clocks they run according to day night rhythms for example feel most lonely at night and during the day bunch of find out why join us for more next week until then up by.

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the phone from. gang member to trump chef. tim of allah is one of germany's most innovative coronation of so. in just a few years he became one of the best in the world. a tireless perfectionist we meet the man and ask what's the secret to his success. the moment. thirty minutes on d w. five days in the midst of venezuela's crisis in the fight to get aid into the country with a convoy of god own supporters an exclusive d.w. report alongside venezuelan journalist says our buddies

a close look now at the country's catastrophic conditions on the way to colombia a showdown for it. starts march eighteenth. i was issued when i arrived here i slept with six people in a room. it was hard. i even got white hair. but jim language help me a lot this gives me a little push maybe to entrap it's the flavor you want to know their story the muslims are fighting and for a little information for margaret. sordo just couldn't get this song out of his head. musicologist began searching for the source of these captivating sounds. the rain forest in central africa.

by their culture that he stayed. only a promise to his son was gone. only once will return to the concrete and glass jungle of new york. the result w. . the primary suspect in friday's deadly mass shooting in new zealand has been remanded without police by a christchurch court the suspect a twenty eight year old australian and a self-proclaimed white supremacist is charged with murder that forty nine people were killed and at least forty two injured in the attack. mr. venezuela has released german journalist billy six the thirty one year old has spent the last four months in jail on as.