The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has announced that its Advanced Land Observing Satellite "DAICHI" (ALOS) has reached the end of its operational life following the loss of power onboard.

During the five years it spent monitoring the planet, ALOS took 6.5 million images. Many of these images have contributed to GEO’s ongoing work on monitoring the world’s forests under the Forest Carbon Tracking task.

Other images have contributed to emergency observations of disaster-stricken areas. For example, the GEO Geohazards Supersites and the International Charter on Space and Major Disasters relied on ALOS for monitoring the recent earthquakes in Haiti, Chile and Japan.

Among other uses, the images have been used to generate interferograms for measuring the displacement and stresses resulting from an earthquake.

“ALOS has made an enormous contribution to global efforts to monitor and manage the Earth,” said José Achache, GEO’s Secretariat Director. “I very much look forward to JAXA’s launch of ALOS-2 in 2013 and ALOS-3 a year or so after that. These launches promise to sustain the critical stream of observations that Japan has been generously sharing with the international community.”　For more information, see the JAXA press release.

Source：http://www.earthobservations.org/art_201105_alos.shtml

Provided by:

Center for Earth Observation and Digital Earth,CAS;The Lanzhou Branch of the National Science Library/The Scientific Information Center for Resources and Environment,CAS