The eyes of the Italian Space Agency satellites traced the path of the Transglobal Car Expedition while it’s moving to the Arctic stage, providing an image a day to orient explorers in the circumnavigation of the Earth.
Rome, April 2 2024 – Eight men and four heavy vehicles are the components of a caravan aiming to circumnavigate the Earth by crossing both poles in 18 months, starting from New York. In their Arctic crossing, they will navigate through ice thanks to the careful eyes of the COSMO-SkyMed satellites, which, since March 29, are providing the indications needed to choose the Transglobal Car Expedition route.
The COSMO-SkyMed constellation images with their high quality enable the crew to move over the ice with precision and safety, an essential and unique support unsuccessful to other satellite systems.
This is a first for images of this kind!
The Italian Space Agency (ASI) with the operational support of e-GEOS (Telespazio/ASI), the worldwide exclusive dealer of COSMO-SkyMed data, is programming and providing a 200×200 Km swath image per day using the upgraded performance of the system second-generation. Based on these images, the expedition is able to choose the most effective and best route to get to the North Pole and then reach Greenland.
The Expedition, after a deep analysis, has found in the Italian constellation a suitable partner to satisfy both the observation needs and the data provision to support the choice of a safe route.
Since March 29, the Italian Space Agency made the COSMO-SkyMed acquisitions available, providing images of Arctic explorers at very high latitudes thus identifying the best direction to reach the pole.
The Expedition will cross both the geographical and magnetic poles. The aim is to collect ice thickness data both of the North and South Poles and data on the cosmic radiation flux coming from distant regions of our Universe, on light pollution and concerning the study of human physiological changes in extreme environments. The mission scientific program is characterized by the full respect for environmental sustainability by using ad hoc equipments and mobile vehicles and provides the measurement of crucial parameters for the understanding of the last 5-10 years climate change, which is warming up our planet like never before.
COSMO-SkyMed is a constellation of X-Band satellites developed by the Italian Space Agency in cooperation with the Ministry of Defense, with the first satellite launched in 2007: a spearhead in the Earth Observation domain that today has five satellites operational, 3 of the first generation and 2 of the second one, and that soon will be integrated with two additional satellites.
Exactly four months after the Transglobal Car Expedition reached the North Pole the expedition made its way to Geneva, Switzerland. The Transglobal Citizen Science School forum, hosted at CERN and sponsored by the Goodgear Around the World Association, PolarQuest, and the MW Shakhnovskiy Foundation, brought together three teams from Lebanon, Georgia, and Uganda, with a total of around 20 future scientists participating. The generous support of Olga and Vasily Shakhnovskiy, through their family foundation, made this event possible for students from Africa, the Middle East, and the Caucasus, covering all travel expenses to Switzerland and France.
The Citizen Science School Forum at CERN was organized to inspire the next generation of scientists by immersing them in the world of research and discovery. To this end, students were not merely visitors to CERN but active participants, having conducted their own scientific research prior to their arrival at CERN through various citizen science initiatives.
One of the key projects, CREDO, offered students the opportunity to explore one of the theories of Dark Matter. One idea is that it is made of “super-massive particles” born in the early Universe. If this theory proved to be true, while we cannot see such particles directly, we know that at the end of their life they would produce very high energy photons. Interacting with the atmosphere, such photons would create “super-preshowers” of low-energy particles. We are unable to see dark matter particles, but we can observe these super-preshowers – and that is exactly what our citizen scientists did. Equipped with smartphones, the student teams became particle hunters, contributing to the world’s largest cosmic radiation detector by capturing the remarkable number of 404,000 cosmic radiation particles.
Another project, Globe at Night, aimed to raise awareness about light pollution. The citizen scientists engaged in this initiative by measuring the brightness of the night sky, collecting extensive data that highlights the impact of artificial lighting on our environment. Their contributions added valuable data to a global effort to understand light pollution.
At CERN, our citizen scientists were able to engage directly with the scientific processes that power some of the world’s most advanced research. By building Cloud Chambers, analyzing cosmic ray data, and visiting pivotal CERN sites like the Synchrocyclotron, the CERN Control Center and the Antimatter Factory, they saw firsthand how theoretical concepts translate into real-world applications. The students showed remarkable curiosity, showing their deep understanding of the subject matter.
They interacted with not only CERN scientists but also the Transglobal Expedition crew. Among other things, the crew talked about their record of taking the northernmost measurement of cosmic rays. The students also learned about other aspects of the expedition, including the expedition’s use of satellite guidance to make their way in the melting polar ice shelf and the ice thickness in situ measurements, another first in polar science, that the crew has been carrying out while crossing the Canadian Arctic towards the North Pole and back via Greenland. They also got some information on the challenges the expedition crew had to overcome on their journey, travelling around 10,000 km in 4 months, and having had to adapt to extreme climate.
Perhaps the most important aspect of the Geneva program was its potential to inspire. By interacting with scientists and the Transglobal crew, contributing to scientific research with their own citizen science projects, and exploring the inner workings of CERN and the Transglobal Car Expedition, the students were encouraged to further pursue science.
At the end of the event Nakirijja Betty, supervisor for the Uganda team, expressed how much this experience meant to her and her students:
“Thank you for giving us the opportunity to travel here and see the different machines that physicists have made. In our country, we know about the theory part of it, but for the first time, my students and I were able to see the equipment that follows these theories. And I am sure, this experience is going to change a student’s life”.