New findings from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) provide the strongest evidence yet that liquid water flows intermittently on present-day Mars.
September – October 2015 Table of Contents
LiDAR data”if collected, analyzed and disseminated to local residents and policy makers”can be invaluable in mapping landslide hazards. In turn, such mapping can greatly help mitigate the consequences of landslides. After the Oso disaster, interest in landslide hazards grew significantly in Washington as well as Oregon, California and other mountainous states.
SENSOR SPOTLIGHT: TotalSight Flash LiDAR from Ball Aerospace
Ball Aerospace has been actively developing its TotalSight Flash LiDAR system for the last six years. Flash LiDAR works much like a traditional digital camera, with the sensor taking a range and intensity snapshot with each laser pulse.
Industry Overview: Moving from Measurement to Management
Ambitious statewide use of LiDAR is a natural progression for the technology, as the realism of such data dramatically improves human understanding.
Drones and New Applications for Precision Agriculture
Basic crop scouting from drones provides a major improvement over how field surveys previously were done, and it's the primary driver for drone-technology adoption. Crop scouts traditionally were employed to walk farm fields to monitor crop condition. This is hot, time-consuming work, and crop scouts have difficulty visiting even a small percentage of a whole field, easily missing problem areas.
Mississippi Swampland Seen from Space
This Sentinel-2A ˜color vision' image captures part of the Mississippi swamps on the east and west banks of the Mississippi River, south of New Orleans and north of the Mississippi Delta. The red color shows vegetation, while gray represents bodies of water.
Earth-Observation Market Reports Released
A pair of Earth-observation industry market reports were published almost simultaneously in September 2015, and both were optimistic as to the current and future states of satellite-based remote sensing.
New Smallsat Technologies Targeted for Wildfire Response
Aquila Space is building briefcase-sized satellites that can capture and send back images of more than 12 million square miles of Earth daily. Meanwhile, its Silicon Valley partner Astro Digital is developing software that allows anyone to process and analyze the data.
Drones Monitor Chimpanzee Habitat in Tanzania
Ecologist Jeff Kerby is using Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UASs), or drones, to count chimpanzee nests and monitor their habitat in Tanzania's Ugalla Forest. Such counts typically are performed on foot, but UASs allowed researchers to cover a much larger area at reduced time and cost.
University Coalition Developing UASs to Improve Weather Forecasting
Oklahoma State University (OSU) as well as the universities of Oklahoma, Nebraska and Kentucky will share a $6 million, four-year grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a small Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) that improves weather forecasting by studying atmospheric physics.
