The World, Live - Just a Click Away 

By Kathy Sawyer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 13, 1998; Page A01

Based on a moment of midnight inspiration, Vice President Gore today
will announce his plan to make a live video image of the full, sunlit Earth -
spinning on its axis against the blackness of space - continuously available
to the world, via television and the Internet. 

The vice president's idea and, perhaps more important, his sense of
urgency have triggered a scramble at NASA to make it happen
inexpensively - and fast. 

Gore plans to unveil the project today at MIT, in a speech to be delivered
at a technology conference. He conceived the project a month ago,
officials say, and he hopes to see it launched by 2000. 

The "all-Earth, all-the-time" images, to be transmitted from a small
spacecraft stationed between Earth and the sun, would resemble the
historic portrait of the fragile and isolated blue planet snapped by Apollo
17 astronauts - the last men on the moon - on Dec. 7, 1972, a picture
that has become an icon. But the new version, capturing surface features
as small as five miles square, would depict the motions of changing clouds,
the advance of hurricanes, large-scale fires in oil fields or forests and other
phenomena as they actually exist virtually at that same moment. 

NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin said he hopes to keep the project's
cost close to $20 million and definitely below $50 million, and will solicit
commercial participation - by a cable TV company, for example - to
lower the costs even further. 

One earth scientist, upon hearing a description of the previously
undisclosed project, said some experts may question the scientific value of
the project, which has never been proposed through routine channels. 

But Gore, who has a blow-up of the Apollo 17 image mounted on the
wall of his office in the West Wing of the White House, said he is
convinced the project will have scientific, educational and spiritual
benefits. 

"I believe there is tremendous scientific value in having constant live
television pictures of the Earth. . . . With the entire hemisphere in view,
fully lit by the sun, scientists will be able to analyze weather systems and
cloud patterns in ways they cannot today," he said in an interview
yesterday. "With global warming a growing concern, and with problems
like El Nino causing growing concern, this will be of tremendous value." 

Asrar R. Ghassem, NASA's chief of earth science, and others noted that
no such full-Earth images are currently available, though much of the globe
can be pieced together in a mosaic from existing satellite images, and the
Galileo probe took some snapshots as it rounded Earth on its way to
Jupiter. 

The live Earth picture would be transmitted from a 330-pound spacecraft
- about five feet in diameter - stationed 1 million miles out, orbiting the
sun in tandem with Earth at the point where the sun's gravity exactly
counterbalances that of Earth. Positioning the craft at that point will enable
it to remain constantly aimed at the hemisphere of Earth that is in full
sunlight and will minimize the need for engine firings to maintain its post. 

Gore said he has suggested that the spacecraft be named Triana, after
Rodrigo de Triana, the lookout on Columbus's ship who first sighted the
New World. The ground station network, he said, could be called
Earth-Span, "with apologies to C-SPAN." 

The spacecraft is to be equipped with an eight-inch telescope and a
three-color camera capable of twice the sharpness of high-definition TV,
with the image to be "refreshed" every few minutes, Goldin said. Ground
stations for the satellite are to be operated by university students, in
keeping with the Clinton administration's push to increase interest in
science and math. 

Some of those familiar with the project acknowledged that there are many
"unknowns" connected with the mission and that there might be some
skepticism about its value. But they pointed out that, before the first
geostationary satellites were placed high above Earth, no one predicted all
the uses that would be made of them. 

Gore, who has made protection of the global environment one of the core
commitments of his political career, said he believes the Apollo program's
"blue marble" images of Earth helped trigger the environmental movement.
Of the new project, he said, "I believe it will have an inspirational value
that's hard to describe." 

Goldin said he first learned of the planned announcement only last Friday,
when Gore phoned him just as the NASA administrator was finishing a
speech in Houston. And that was just weeks after Gore first presented the
idea to Goldin, in mid-February. "My head is still spinning," Goldin said. 

After Friday, NASA added two more people to the four full-time
employees working on the plan, he said. "They are on fire," he said. The
team is trying to move quickly, he added, in keeping with Gore's wishes,
but also hoping to avoid a "ready, shoot, aim" problem in racing the
concept to implementation. Goldin emphasized that he hopes to bring the
Republican-led Congress into the planning as soon as possible, within a
few weeks. 

Gore almost literally dreamed up the idea in his sleep about a month ago,
waking at 3 a.m. one night, according to a White House official. Later that
morning, Gore did about 20 minutes' worth of research on the Internet,
called Goldin, and by that afternoon had a NASA team assembled at the
White House to discuss the idea and begin working out engineering
concepts. 

         © Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company