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In terms of country based quotations ("Most scited countries") I cannot access space science, only Geosciences, Immunology, Material Science, and Psychiatry & Psychology. But when I first saw the list of countries at the left under "Impact in Science" I saw Argentinia was on top, and USA was on last position. Yes, I was surprised, until I realised that is was just an alphabetical order. Did you see the same list?

scotland's a separate country. must be preparing for independence already. and it's highest percentage is for space science. crazy

Dajan, you need to click on the country you are interested in ....

Nooo, can't be THAT simple.

data a bit old .... newer data (but less well presented) at http://sciencewatch.com/ there you can also read: "The 20th century was largely dominated by the US as a major powerhouse of scientific research and innovation, with 40% of the papers indexed in the Web of Science fielded by US scientists in the 1990s. By 2009, that figure was down to 29%. The US now struggles to keep pace with increased output from Europe and Asia."

hottest space science paper in January 2012: Field: Space Science Article Title: Herschel Space Observatory An ESA facility for far-infrared and submillimetre astronomy Authors: Pilbratt, GL;Riedinger, JR;Passvogel, T;Crone, G;Doyle, D;Gageur, U;Heras, AM;Jewell, C;Metcalfe, L;Ott, S;Schmidt, M Journal: ASTRON ASTROPHYS, 518: art. no.-L1 JUL-AUG 2010 * ESTEC SRE SA, ESA Res & Sci Support Dept, Keplerlaan 1, NL-2201 AZ Noordwijk, Netherlands. * ESTEC SRE SA, ESA Res & Sci Support Dept, NL-2201 AZ Noordwijk, Netherlands. * ESTEC SRE OA, ESA Sci Operat Dept, NL-2201 AZ Noordwijk, Netherlands. * ESTEC SRE P, ESA Sci Operat Dept, NL-2201 AZ Noordwijk, Netherlands. * ESOC OPS OAH, ESA Mission Operat Dept, D-64293 Darmstadt, Germany. * ESAC SRE OA, ESA Sci Operat Dept, Madrid 28691, Spain.

Interestingly, Space Science is the only field in which my country has positive "Impact vs. world" value (even more interestingly as we don't even have a proper national space agency)...

geee... I want to see how they "exercise" it :)

Good stuff, no way it will be done in the netherlands however due to the 'equal-return' law in place here still that puts the price of returning to the grid equal to the costs of buying. The costs of this law are enormous however and energy companies would love to get rid off it, and it will in the upcoming years most likely. I wonder however if that makes sense on a regional/national level, returning to the grid on that scale produces a more stable supply. Why store for personal use only?

and here comes my standard question: how can we use this for space? fast detection of natural disasters onboard?

Even on ground. You could for example teach it what nuclear reactors or missiles or other weapons you don't want look like on satellite pictures and automatically scan the world for them (basically replacing intelligence analysts).

In fact, I think this could make a nice ACT project: counting seals from satellite imagery is an actual (and quite recent) thing: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0092613 In this publication they did it manually from a GeoEye 1 b/w image, which sounds quite tedious. Maybe one can train one of those image recognition algorithms to do it automatically. Or maybe it's a bit easier to count larger things, like elephants (also a thing).

In HiPEAC (High Performance, embedded architecture and computation) conference I attended in the beginning of this year there was a big trend of CUDA GPU vs FPGA for hardware accelerated image processing. Most of it orbitting around discussing who was faster and cheaper with people from NVIDIA in one side and people from Xilinx and Intel in the other. I remember of talking with an IBM scientist working on hardware accelerated data processing working together with the Radio telescope institute in Netherlands about the solution where they working on (GPU CUDA). I gathered that NVIDIA GPU suits best in applications that somehow do not rely in hardware, having the advantage of being programmed in a 'easy' way accessible to a scientist. FPGA's are highly reliable components with the advantage of being available in radhard versions, but requiring specific knowledge of physical circuit design and tailored 'harsh' programming languages. I don't know what is the level of rad hardness in NVIDIA's GPUs... Therefore FPGAs are indeed the standard choice for image processing in space missions (a talk with the microelectronics department guys could expand on this), whereas GPUs are currently used in some ground based (radio astronomy or other types of telescopes). I think that on for a specific purpose as the one you mentioned, this FPGA vs GPU should be assessed first before going further.