From CHRIS ENGLAND
Your story on the oil fires in Kuwait contained an error (This Week,
2 March). The Meteosat spacecraft is a purely European satellite, operated
by the Eumetsat organisation from the European Space Operations Centre at
Darmstadt in Germany and funded primarily through the national meteorological
organisations, and not by any US agency as your article implied. It does,
of course, form part of a global network of meteorological spacecraft, including
US and Japanese satellites, for monitoring weather systems and, incidentally,
large scale pollution, but it is a distinctly European contribution to this
task.
Chris England, Vipin Gupta Imperial College, London
