The two recipients of the 2023 European Space Agency (ESA) Postgraduate Research Grants at the Historical Archives of the European Union have something in common: a shared interest in how Europe developed the satellite technology that now informs so much of climate research.
Dr Gemma Cirac-Claveras, associate professor at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and historian of science and technology, was awarded a grant for her project The History of a Curve. Satellites, Sea Level Rise, and Climate Change. Gemma will be consulting, among others, the fonds on the ERS-1 mission, which employed satellite technology for earth observation and environmental monitoring, including the collection of data on oceans and polar ice caps. Her broad research goal is “to write a history of the climate sciences, practices and politics seen through the prism of the processes of collecting, producing, storing, disseminating, and consuming satellite data”. Relatedly, she will treat the question of “how to historicize the contemporary regime of production, dissemination and use of environmental information?”.
Dorian Groll, a PhD candidate at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, received support to pursue research for his dissertation project Governing climate through satellites and algorithms. The development, diffusion and use of Copernicus data for climate governance. The dissertation examines “the early days of international cooperation for environmental remote sensing and the emergence of the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security GMES /Copernicus programme, as well as similar initiatives”. By studying the European programme Copernicus, he aims to develop a genealogy of climate remote sensing and an understanding of how the production and diffusion of satellite data for environmental purposes came into being.
The European Space Agency Postgraduate Research Grants are offered by the ESA and the European University Institute to support European post-graduate scholarship on the history of the ESA and Europe in space. The historical archives of ESA and its predecessor organisations (ELDO and ESRO) are deposited at the HAEU and are generally open for consultation after 15 years.
Photo: ERS-1 (European Remote Sensing satellite) in orbit, by ESA. Photo retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ERS-1_ESA382541.jpg (CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)