add ons to what it's like to be children rice said in the us. in sixty minutes two dollars. sacks make. raring to reach. if there is any erotic thread between them you'd have to find it between the lines. literature hundred german streets. welcome to tomorrow today the science show on g.w. coming up i look down at. what is the view from space reveal satellites our eyes 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 human natick the earth is at night looks lovely but like pollution is a huge problem. earth all of it has become a crowded superhighway there currently around five thousand satellites circling a 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 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 didn't i 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 differing idea. yet within a few. here's the start up 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 earth's surface. but there were some hair raising minutes shortly after liftoff. to

concentrate us up to 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 and replug the antenna everybody in the team heaved a huge sigh of relief but it was. the indian triumph brought sig out 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. so i believe

that's where the whole system but there are a lot of questions surrounding satellites as orbiting surveillance systems on ethical questions questions of being observed. does 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 i believe 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 pretzels and a house maybe ten by ten. and you couldn't see any people so you couldn't be identified if you will. 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. 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. a satellite for the right here and robi your. some boat 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 i 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 but 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 small berlin startup isn't just playing around and it could end up changing own our lives. satellites can make out a lot from up that like the hot on end of galus narcan crazy 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 state to be useful here are five examples. example number one. zero in may twenty sixth in the village of b d b d in 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 getting pity. within a few months the ugandan government built dozens of new roads dwellings hospitals and schools. biddy pretty soon became a city today it's home to about two hundred ninety thousand people. at the time a 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. government spying 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. 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 got. but also investors can benefit from such information it can be worth a fortune on the stock market. example number four. major retail chains high companies to carry out satellite surveillance of the competition focusing on their parking lots over a period of months the 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 it's worth building a new store. 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 and n.g.o.s use satellite images to identify unregistered trawlers. the 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 identified analysts can check whether or not it's 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. the view from space reveals a nighttime earth that glows with artificial light. and light pollution is on the rise. here we see how. if you mean nation in india crew over a five year period. according to a study more than eighty percent of the world's population lives under a light polluted night sky. what does this loss of darkness mean for the world. own life it has 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. does this and models all this is a model of a son and i use it so it's playing on the one hand how a star actually functions out of style is and on the other to show the size of our planet as compared to it or that i'm holding on to some i am now with the earth in my pocket is there if that's how small it is compared to the sun. 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 light years away but the night is disappearing says manuel phillip 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 now rarely seems. a bit fresh on it's once only twenty to thirty percent of us still see the night sky as it really is the other seventy to eighty percent of us can't see it like this anymore simply because of the vast increase in artificial light it's been increasingly swamping the night sky for the last ten to twenty years at least of course lists a twinked. 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 up the entire planet. and nights are growing over two percent brighter everyone here. artificial light has a harmful emissions that has encountered killable effects on ecosystems. then if there's not enough darkness it changes things but it's beginning 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. banishing darkness it's a basic human instinct. anything can happen and darkness it's where monsters

tread. the undead to come back to life at night. right and the world is their domain and tell 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 . you're hearing is all right here in the spiral galaxy this is where we live where i'm putting this little crumb about half way in from the edge towards the center that's 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 heaven's the unfathomable within and the incomprehensible above. the night is time that can't be used effectively a time of rest that has a beauty all its own. and there's the cliche of a riotous night life 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 metaphor to say that we are indeed made from stardust. just simply for us the body he had to call we have come from space where part of base is up. 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 be as one is in the and . 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 like pollution we asked on facebook for your

views on the topic does artificial light equal progress or to the 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. he 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 plea 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 only a year long from her home in chile. thank you for all your comments. darkness and light there's lots of it 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 envelope of what we know it's specialized to cover the gamma ray spectrum and measure thayne 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 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 institute's garden they've set up

a large scale model to test their design. it's 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 in mark's planck 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. the 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 then. 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 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 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 oh. 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 it has a lesser effect in the deps the satellites found the deepest indentation close to southern india if our friend peter it 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 meters 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 will. 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 wait 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 red white object but only very late. do you have a science question that you've always wanted and said we're happy to help out senator i said as a video text ovoid well if we answer it on this show will send you

a little surprise as a thank you cannot 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 moon's he'll most likely at night and during the day bunch of find out why join us for more next week until then up by.

one hundred german must reads list of not to be missed german novels in the english translation. among them one of the many bestsellers written michael media from kurt. we visited her in los angeles and asked her what it's like to be

a german reisa in the u.s. . in the thirty minutes. forty. five days in the midst of venezuela's crisis in a fight to get aid into the country with a convoy of kwan guide own supporters and exclusive d.w. report alongside venezuelan journalist since our panties a close look at the country's catastrophic conditions on the way to colombia a showdown on the border. starts march eighteenth. what's the connection between bread flour and the european you. know

guilt much s t w correspondent and avid baker crap. turn to state and local about recipes for success past strategies that make a difference. at baking bread. on g.w. . a city in ruins morocco a. symbol of a long conflict in the philippines. between the muslims and the christian population last night as fighters occupied the city center in two thousand and seven team president to churches response was brutal. i. will never again football game of. the ring conquest turned into tragedy this is not the kind of freedom that we want. how did morality become a gateway to islamist terror. an exclusive report from

a destroyed city. film in the sights of virus starts april eleventh on d w. this is deja vu news live from berlin new zealand's prime minister just into our turn promises to tighten her country's gun laws following the christ church mosque killings that left fifty people dead she says her cabinet will discuss the policy changes on monday also coming up. flash floods and landslides triggered by torrential rain that killed dozens in indonesia's eternals province of papua. the

philippines turns its back on the international criminal court today.