![]() Educational institutions and non-profits in the U.S. Providing higher resolution imagery than civil satellites, the pint-sized CubeSat – at anywhere from 10 to 240 square centimeters in size – is also used for commercial and educational purposes, and for scientific research. Two scientists with a small swarm of CubeSats capable of collecting and transferring scientific data. We see if it works well, then we can infuse the technology into a bigger program.” “To do that, we put that one specific part of the technology on a satellite and fly it. “CubeSats are the best way to try out whether that technology is really useful,” he says. So far, these have included compact instruments to measure evapotranspiration and radio occultation measurements that can measure root zone soil moisture. A new, low-cost pathway to research, these can, he explains, provide trial runs for new technologies in space. But we refined it a little bit.” By sending down 14-bit image data instead of 12-bit, he says, “you have a more dynamic range of data, and that means you can see even smaller changes on the ground, which enhances the quality of the data.”Īs program manager of NASA’s In-space Validation of Earth Science Technologies ( InVEST), Babu also works in the relatively new field of CubeSats. This September will see the launch of Landsat 9, which is, says Babu, “mostly identical to Landsat 8 in shape, size, and weight, and it uses the same hardware. Is fire due to lack of moisture? Or hot air that’s in that area? So that’s a very advanced thing that’s going on right now.” A chart mapping the Landsat 9 mission development and lifecycle. “The tool will take data from satellite measurements and calculate moisture index,” he says, “which can estimate the chances of forest or bush fires. For example, “the Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) on Landsat measures evapotranspiration, and western states’ water management of the Colorado River depends heavily on this measurement.”īabu and his colleagues are now in the process of developing a new tool, which they hope to have ready soon, for identifying potential forest fires. Over the decades since its first launch, Landsat and other civil satellites have proven useful to ecologists with their ability to monitor plant health, land cover and water, he says. “When you talk about NASA, many people know only about things like our Mars expedition,” says Sachidananda Babu, who is in charge of its Sustainable Land Imaging Technology (SLI-T) program, “but they don’t realize how much effort we spend on preserving our own planet, Earth.” Experiments in orbit Today, a veritable constellation of satellites of all shapes and sizes, both public and private, constantly orbit and monitor what’s happening on Earth, deepening and extending that pool of knowledge. Ever since the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) together with the United States Geological Survey launched the world’s first Landsat satellite in 1972, a continual stream of data on everything from deforestation to glacier retreat to weather patterns has been recorded and archived, providing an incredibly valuable picture of long-term change to scientists, land managers, policy-makers and many others. NASAīut it’s not just biodiversity that satellites are aiding. ![]() The student built CubeSat Radio Frequency Tag Satellite (RFTSat) is deployed from the International Space Station using a deployment system called SlingShot. “They provide you with the opportunity to monitor the Earth globally and monitor aspects of biodiversity that were very much neglected before.” Monitoring extraordinarily large territories, providing access through visibility to remote areas, and boosting transparency of countries’ environmental standards are some of the benefits she cites. Satellites “change everything,” says Nathalie Pettorelli, a senior research fellow at the Zoological Society of London and author of the book Satellite Remote Sensing and the Management of Natural Resources. The notion that schoolkids are as capable of accessing Earth Observation data as scientists and government ministers is an indication of how satellite technology has revolutionized scientific research across the globe, and especially of the environment. They then passed on their findings to the BAS. Inspired by a David Attenborough program on the plight of the iconic bird, the teens and their teacher used satellite mapping imagery from the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Sentinel-2, developed an algorithm, and found traces of unknown and unconfirmed colonies. When researchers from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) published a study last year on its discovery of 11 new colonies of emperor penguins, they acknowledged an unusual source of assistance – students at Stirling High School in Scotland.
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