Mission Earth

How does your cell phone know where you are right now? How is our planet changing due to geodynamic processes and ongoing climate change? How can these changes be precisely measured from space in order to obtain reliable information about, for example, the melting of the ice sheets or the threat to coastal regions from rising sea levels? This non-fiction book provides answers to these socially relevant questions. It is aimed at interested laypersons who want to learn more about our fascinating planet, but also at experts in scientific disciplines. You will be taken on an exciting journey through time from the first surveys in antiquity to the age of satellites, which enable us to determine extremely precise positions worldwide and provide a global view of our home planet. Illustrative examples are used to show how deeply global positioning and navigation with satellites have penetrated our everyday lives, and what fundamental contributions geodesy, as the science of measuring the Earth, makes to understanding the Earth system and determining the effects of climate change.

With interview contributions by Gunter Hein, Harald Lesch and Stefan Rahmstorf.

This book is a translation of the original German 1^st edition Mission Erde by Detlef Angermann, published by Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature in 2021. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the development of tools for the production of books and on the related technologies to support the authors.