“This is the first satellite to make measurements of the top 3 constituents of the carbon cycle as well as maps of solar induced fluorescence, a measure of plant productivity,” says Dr. Kulawik.  “The spatial resolution and coverage of the data is unprecedented.  This is also the first time we will have multiple observations of the same locations at different times of day.”

Dr. Kulawik also works on validation for the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (“OCO-2”), which uses data from three high‐resolution grating spectrometers placed aboard a satellite launched in 2014 to measure carbon dioxide.  “We’ve learned a great deal from the OCO-2 mission as well as other remote sensing missions, and we will be applying everything we’ve learned to GeoCARB.”

The GeoCARB mission will scan each of the boxes shown above several times a day to estimate methane, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide.

Download the PDF BAER 2016 Timetable here.

The NASA Student Airborne Research Program (SARP) is funded by the NASA Ames Cooperative for Research in Earth Science and Technology (ARC- CREST) and managed by the National Suborbital Research Center (NSRC). SARP 2017 will take place in Southern California (June 18 – August 11, 2017) with research locations based at the University of California, Irvine and at the NASA Armstrong Aircraft Operations Facility in Palmdale.

Participants will acquire hands-on research experience in all aspects of a scientific campaign, including flying onboard the NASA C-23 Sherpa, a highly-specialized research aircraft used for studying Earth system processes.

APPLICATION DEADLINE: FEBRUARY 1, 2017

Download the flyer here for more information.

Application can be found at: http://earthscience.arc.nasa.gov/nsrc/sarp

Email questions to [email protected]

The GHG inventory project will be led by Dr. Sassan Saatchi from the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab and Caltech, and it will contribute to reporting by the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The proposed work will produce spatial products on carbon stocks and fluxes with the low latency for national carbon management and reporting. Extensive analysis needs to be performed to integrate high-resolution remote sensing-derived products and models to produce these datasets.

The second project, led by Dr. Robert Kennedy from Oregon State University, aims at developing tools to integrate static and dynamic CMS products of any temporal, spatial, and semantic content into a consistent, continental-wide, derived database of yearly land cover, biomass, disturbance, and growth in terrestrial systems, along with spatially explicit and consistent uncertainties.  All the analysis tools and workflows will be built on the NEX platform, and a significant end product will provide a smart application programming interface (API) to allow modelers and stakeholders easy access to these data in the spatial, temporal, and information domain on demand.

Besides Dr. Ganguly’s involvement from BAER, the NASA CMS project teams include scientists from the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab/ Caltech, UC Berkeley, USDA, Applied Geosolutions, Oregon State University, Conservation Biology Institute, Northern Arizona University, Clark University, USFS, Colorado State University, LP DAAC and ORNL DAAC.

Read more here: http://news.mit.edu/2016/better-views-smaller-satellites-0712

The first technology the award recognizes is a diffractive pupil mask that Dr. Bendek designed, built, and tested.  The mask amplifies the capability of telescopes such as the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope-Astrophysics Focused Telescope Assets(WFIRST-AFTA), Habitable Exoplanet (HabEx), Large UV/Optical/Near-infrared Telescope (LUVOIR), and others.  Dr. Bendek’s invention will allow such telescopes to directly image exoplanets while simultaneously making highly precise measurements of the astrometry wobbles of the host stars. These observations can independently confirm the presence of the planet early in the mission, enabling more efficient use of mission time and therefore, the surveying of more targets.  The mask can also provide more accurate measurements of planetary mass.

Dr. Bendek has also developed a low-cost, miniaturized electronics controller for a deformable mirror which he demonstrated in the NASA Ames Research Center Coronagraph Experiment lab.

Both his techniques enable direct imaging to reach its full potential at lower costs and will apply to smaller missions than previously envisioned.

BIDS Data Science Lecture Series | September 25, 2016 | 1:00-2:30 p.m. | 190 Doe Library, UC Berkeley

Speaker: Sangram Ganguly, Senior Research Scientist, NASA
Sponsors: Berkeley Institute for Data Science, Data, Society and Inference Seminar

NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) provides a unique collaborative platform for scientists and researchers around the world to do research in a scientifically complex area. NEX provides customized open source tools, scientific workflows, access to petabytes of satellite and climate data, models, and computing power. Over the past three years, NEX has evolved in terms of handling projects that deal with data complexity, model integration, and high-performance computing. Another unique aspect of NEX is its collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to create the OpenNEX platform, which leverages the full stack of AWS’s cloud computing platform to demonstrate scientifically relevant projects for government agencies, commercial companies, and other stakeholders. OpenNEX provides access to a wide variety of data through AWS’s public datasets program and virtual machines that replicates a certain workflow capturing data access, search, analysis, computation, and visualization. OpenNEX collaborated with Berkeley’s Geospatial Innovation Facility (GIF) to create an open source visualization dashboard for visualizing the downscaled climate projections dataset. A pressing need in both initiatives is how to deal with large image datasets and efficiently analyze these images using high-performance and cloud computing infrastructures. With funding from several NASA program elements (e.g., AIST, ACCESS, CMS), NEX has showcased activities in which new machine learning algorithms can be deployed and scaled across these computer architectures to process very high-resolution imagery datasets for object classification, segmentation, and feature extraction. An example relates to processing quarter million image scenes from the 1-m multispectral NAIP dataset to estimate tree cover for the continental United States given the large complexities and heterogeneity in land cover types. New computational techniques using open source tools and cloud architectures are a must in achieving performance efficiency in some of the heritage scientific research domains and analyses.

Drs. Bera and Cruz-Diaz began their two-day presentation by outlining their background and education and then explaining their work with the Astrobiology team at NASA Ames.  The presentation continued with an introduction to astrochemistry and astrobiology followed by a flame-test demonstration.  The students then used hand-held spectrometers to learn more about IR spectroscopy.

The next day the students participated in a comet making activity using three pounds of dry ice and debris collected from the Academy’s front lawn.  The students next participated in a chromatography experiment to identify an unknown mixture made of two food colors. The event ended with a demonstration using the Orrey kit of the Kepler space telescope.

Dr. Lim is in Idaho to continue her work on a NASA-sponsored study known as BASALT (Biologic Analog Science Associated with Lava Terrains), for which Dr. Lim is the Principal Investigator.  The BASALT study will examine habitability conditions on early and present-day Mars.  By comparing the physical and geochemical conditions of life in these environments, scientists will learn how to seek, identify, and characterize life and life-related chemistry in basaltic environments that represent the two epochs of Martian geological history.  The work will proceed under simulated Mars mission constraints so that scientists may strategically evaluate selected concepts of operations and capabilities that will be invaluable for joint human and robotic exploration of Mars.

During the event on June 16, scientists and park staff will share details on the research being conducted at the Craters of the Moon Monument.  The event schedule is as follows:

Bottolfsen Park: 2 p.m. – 5 p.m. NASA and ISU scientists will provide tours and demonstrations:

·        Tour the NASA Mobile Mission Command Center

·        Demonstrations: “trashcano” simulated volcanic eruption!, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle simulator, Interplanetary communications demonstration

·        Talk to the experts: Scientists and Park Rangers will be available to answer questions from the public and the media.

Craters of the Moon Visitor Center: 6 p.m. – 8 p.m. Park Rangers and NASA affiliated scientists will provide demonstrations and presentations:

·        View earth’s nearest star (a.k.a. the Sun) through a solar scope

·        Earn a Lunar Ranger patch by participating in fun activities. This Ranger-led event will begin at 6 p.m. (45 minutes).

·        Evening presentation will be provided by the NASA science team beginning at 7 p.m. (45 minutes).

BAER employees, including Dan Chirica, Quincy Allison, Sommer Beddingfield, Erin Czech, Liz Juvera, and Steven Todorov have provided critical mission support, including management of the deployment site and specialized support related to instrument integration and operation, data systems, and communications between mission teams.   The BAERI team also developed and provided IT support for the mission website: https://espo.nasa.gov/home/korus-aq.

Mission participants hope that the experiment will provide critical information that will ultimately lead to the monitoring of air pollution from a series of geostationary satellites.  Mission flights will continue through mid-June.