1 of 4. The United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas-V rocket with the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) spacecraft onboard is seen as it launches at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, February 11, 2013.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Mon Feb 11, 2013 4:26pm EST

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - - A new satellite to keep tabs on Earth's changing landscape rocketed into orbit on Monday, ensuring continuation of a 40-year-old photo archive documenting urban sprawl, glacial melting, natural disasters and other environmental shifts.

The eighth and most sophisticated Landsat spacecraft blasted off at 1:02 p.m. EST (1802 GMT) aboard an unmanned Atlas 5 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The launch was broadcast on NASA Television.

The so-called Landsat Data Continuity Mission, or LDCM, will join the sole operational 14-year-old Landsat 7 spacecraft in providing visible and infrared images from an orbital perch 438 miles above Earth.

The satellites circle the planet every 99 minutes, relaying pictures showing details down to about the size of a baseball diamond.

The images, which are distributed at no charge, are used by federal, state and local governments and planning boards worldwide to monitor crops, assess damage from fires, floods and other natural disasters as well as to track coastlines, glaciers and other areas impacted by global warming.

"LDCM will continue to describe the human impact on Earth and the impact of Earth on humanity, which is vital for accommodating 7 billion people on our planet," project manager Ken Schwer, with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, told reporters during a preflight press conference.

Monitoring food production, for example, is essential to sustaining Earth's growing population, added Thomas Loveland, a senior scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey, which is partnered with NASA on the Landsat program.

"Our federal programs that map the type and extent of crops needed to understand what the food supply will be and the impact on the market will benefit greatly from this," Loveland said.

Landsat's commercial customers include Google, which uses the images in its popular virtual Google Earth program, and the insurance industry which, for example, taps Landsat data to assess risk exposure to wildfires in the western United States and gauge crop production.

The Landsat program has been providing imagery since the first satellite's launch in 1972. LDCM was built by Orbital Sciences Corp.

Once operational, the satellite, which cost NASA $855 million, is expected to relay 400 images per day to ground stations in South Dakota, Alaska and Norway.

The Atlas rocket is manufactured and launched by United Launch Alliance, a joint partnership of Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

(Editing by Paul Simao)

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1 of 2. Researches use heavy machinery to perform a necropsy on a dead finback whale that had washed up on the shore of the Queens borough region of Breezy Point, New York, December 28, 2012.

LOS ANGELES | Fri Dec 28, 2012 5:26pm EST

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Several endangered whale species may get a new lease on life when some cargo shipping lanes off the California coast are shifted next year.

Routes due to be changed by June 2013 are used by ocean-going cargo vessels, tugboats and automobile carriers near San Francisco Bay, the Channel Islands in central California and the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, environmental officials said on Friday.

The shipping channels overlap with whale feeding and migration areas, and several blue whales and fin whales have been killed by ships, they said.

"The issue really struck home for us" with those deaths, said Michael Carver, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) deputy superintendent of Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary in northern California.

The changes will not reduce the risk to zero, said Sean Hastings, a resource protection coordination with NOAA's Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary.

Financial incentives to get vessels to slow down on their approach to the California coast are also being considered, Hastings said, adding that boats are now asked to voluntarily slow down but they are not doing it.

The Cordell sanctuary and other protected patches of ocean near San Francisco and the Channel Islands are habitats for blue, humpback and fin whales, which are protected by the U.S. Endangered Species Act.

In 2007, four blue whales were believed to have been killed by ships near the Channel Islands, according to NOAA, and five whales were killed off the coast of San Francisco and in nearby areas in 2010.

This year, a fin whale was struck by a ship and died off the coast of San Francisco and a vessel is believed to have killed another fin whale that washed ashore in Malibu, near Los Angeles, NOAA said.

In November, the International Maritime Organization, which governs shipping worldwide, said it had adopted changes to lanes off the coast of California to reduce whale strikes by ships. One of the proposals, for example, involves moving a shipping lane near the Channel Islands north by one mile to avoid a whale feeding area, Hastings said.

Carver said the U.S. Coast Guard would consult with the shipping industry and the public before the lane adjustments take effect.

(Additional reporting by Dana Feldman; Editing by Tim Gaynor)

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n">(Reuters) - California Energy Commission staff on Friday said BrightSource Energy's proposed 500-megawatt Hidden Hills solar thermal power project would have "significant" impact on the environment.

In a statement on the final staff assessment, the state's primary energy planning and policy agency cited impacts on "biological resources, cultural resources, land use, and visual resources" even if recommended mitigation measures are implemented.

BrightSource said the company is looking forward to the formal evidentiary hearings upon which the Commission will base its final decision.

"Unmitigated environmental impacts and non-compliance with applicable laws and regulations would require the Commission to adopt override findings if the project is approved," the CEC said in a statement.

The proposed project would consist of two 250-MW solar plants, each having about 85,000 heliostats - elevated mirrors used to focus the sun's rays on a solar receiver. It would be located on 3,277 acres of private land leased in Inyo County next to the Nevada border.

The construction of the $2.2 billion project, if approved, would take about 29 months with work scheduled to start in the second quarter of 2013 and end in the fourth quarter of 2015.

BrightSource's first major project, the $2.2 billion Ivanpah plant in California, is nearly complete. The 377-megawatt plant is backed by a $1.6 billion government loan guarantee and is expected to enter service in 2013.

California has a goal to produce 33 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2020.

(Reporting by Nichola Groom in Los Angeles and Koustav Samanta in Bangalore; editing by Jim Marshall)

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LOS ANGELES | Thu Dec 20, 2012 8:36pm EST

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The administration of President Barack Obama plans to more than double the size of two marine sanctuaries off the northern California coast to guard the near pristine waters from oil drilling in a move that sidesteps potential hurdles in Congress, federal officials said on Thursday.

The proposed expansion would protect nutrient-rich Pacific Ocean waters off the coast north of San Francisco that are home to humpback whales, great white sharks and abundant fish stocks key to commercial fishing and tourism, officials said.

"This area is a national treasure, it needs and it deserves permanent protection from oil and gas exploration," said Representative Lynn Woolsey, a Democrat who represents Marin and Sonoma counties north of San Francisco.

"Believe me when I tell you that no one is going to vacation on the Sonoma coast if they are going to be looking at oil derricks," she said.

The protected zone covers nearly 2,800 square nautical miles, an area slightly bigger than the state of Delaware. From north to south, it ranges from the coast of the town of Point Arena to the waters beyond San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge.

Amid widespread public opposition in California to offshore drilling, the oil industry says it has no active plans to exploit the designated area.

Woolsey, who is retiring after 10 terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, has pushed for the marine sanctuary expansion since 2004, but says Republican opposition in Congress was preventing its passage.

"The plain fact is that the Republican House majority will not debate or pass this bill," Woolsey said.

A House bill passed in 2008 did not get past the Democratic-controlled Senate that year.

Under pressure from Democratic leaders in Washington, the Obama administration's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has proposed expanding two existing federal marine sanctuaries, Cordell Bank and Gulf of the Farallones.

The process will take up to two years as the agency hears from the public, officials said. The two existing sanctuaries cover over 1,800 nautical square miles, according to NOAA.

Tupper Hull, spokesman for the Western States Petroleum Association, said none of the oil companies in his organization have shown an interest in drilling in northern California.

"It's not an area where there is any expectation that additional energy is going to be brought to market," Hull said.

Several Republican members of Congress active on energy issues could not be reached for comment on the plan.

All of California's offshore oil production comes from 32 platforms off the southern coast of the state, and those derricks date from the late 1960s and early 1970s, Hull said. Drilling in federal waters off California produces only 54,000 barrels a day, compared to 1.3 million a day in the Gulf of Mexico, according to U.S. government figures.

The proposed waters to be protected in northern California has North America's most intense "upswelling" zone, where nutrient-rich water comes to the ocean surface and feeds many kinds of marine life, according to NOAA.

(Reporting By Alex Dobuzinskis; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Todd Eastham)

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LOS ANGELES | Thu Sep 27, 2012 10:29pm EDT

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Police recovered a multimillion-dollar collection of paintings stolen from the Southern California home of superstar bond fund manager Jeffrey Gundlach, and two men are in jail on suspicion of possessing the stolen property, authorities said on Thursday.

The 13 paintings, which included works by Jasper Johns and Piet Mondrian, were taken from Gundlach's home in the coastal city of Santa Monica between September 12 and September 14, officials with the city's police department said.

Gundlach, who was in New York at the time, put forward a $1.7 million reward earlier this week for the recovery of all his stolen art, increasing his previous offer of $200,000.

Officers arrested Jeffrey Nieto, 45, at Al & Ed's Autosound in the Los Angeles suburb of Pasadena on Wednesday in connection with the theft, and recovered most of the paintings at that business, where Nieto is the manager, police said.

They took the second man, Wilmer Cadiz, 40, into custody at his home in nearby San Gabriel and found another four paintings there, police said. The last painting was recovered at a home in the Los Angeles bedroom community of Glendale. The person who had that painting has been interviewed and is cooperating with investigators, police said.

Police are still investigating the case, including whether Nieto and Cadiz committed the actual burglary at Gundlach's home, Santa Monica police spokesman Sergeant Richard Lewis said.

It was not immediately clear if Nieto or Cadiz have attorneys to represent them.

Gundlach, who is chief executive officer and chief investment officer of DoubleLine Capital, in a statement thanked the Santa Monica Police Department for "apprehending the criminals" and recovering "all of the artwork stolen."

"This is a great day for the art world and all those who seek order and justice in our society," Gundlach said. A representative for Gundlach did not immediately respond to an email about payment of the reward in the case.

The stolen art pieces included works by Frank Stella, Guy Rose, Hanson Duvall Puthuff and other artists.

The painting by Jasper Johns, who last year received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, is his 1956 "Green Target." The piece by the late Dutch artist Piet Mondrian is his 1936 "Composition (A) En Rouge Et Blanc."

The Mondrian piece alone is worth between $10 million and $15 million, Lewis said. The total value of the stolen paintings could be up to $39 million, but police initially valued all the items stolen from Gundlach's home at $10 million to be conservative about the price tag, Lewis said.

Police have not recovered a Porsche Carrera 4S sports car taken from Gundlach's home, nor have they found several luxury watches, a handgun and some wine that was also stolen, Lewis said. The car originally sold for $120,000 and the wine was worth $100,000, he said.

Nieto was being held in jail on bail of $500,000 and Cadiz was being held on $20,000, according to Los Angeles County inmate records.

(Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Eric Walsh)

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