From terraforming to farming, NASA seems to have answers.
Doug Rickman, a remote sensing scientist at the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, will report next week on adapting gadgets used to study planets from a distance to map crop fields on Earth. Such a study, nearly plant by plant, may help farmers maximize their yields and livelihoods.
"We are looking at using remote sensing and applying it to agricultural problems, not at a state or national level, but at trying to help the individual farmer make money," Rickman said.
Rickman and his colleagues have found a strong correlation between data collected by an instrument flown on a Learjet and yield data for specific soybean, cotton, corn and wheat fields in Alabama and Georgia.
In one cornfield, aerial images correlated to 87 percent accuracy with the actual crop yield detected on the ground by sensors mounted on combines moving through a field. Results from the air and ground are matched via Global Positioning Satellite coordinates.
J-M Wersinger of Auburn University heads up the "precision agriculture" project and says it is a significant advance over aerial photography or "ground walking" because plant health, and hence eventual yield, can be measured several months ahead of harvest time.
The technology also can map soil characteristics before sprouts even push through its surface, Rickman said.
Those maps include estimates of relative contents of clay, water, organic carbon-based compounds and various mineralogical data.
"Our explicit stated research objective is to make something that is useful for the individual farmer, not the entire state of Kansas or Kazakhstan, but for the individual farmer," Rickman said, "which is an entirely different point of view than has ever been attempted."
The hope is that the $45,000 project could lead to the commercialization of a process that will help farmers decide not only which fields to fertilize or water and when, but also which rows and even which specific plants to water or fertilize.
Farming by Learjet
The crop yield data were collected starting last summer using a Learjet which departed from NASA's Stennis Space Center in southern Mississippi. Carrying an instrument called ATLAS, and its operator, the aircraft cruised at 3,000 feet over specific fields.
Specialists at Auburn University, Alabama A&M and the University of Georgia have helped NASA analyze the data for the past year.
"We have remote sensing. We understand that," Rickman said. "But we don't understand farming. That's not our forte."
The trick to remote sensing for farm yields is to understand which wavelengths of light to collect, and how to interpret them.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, NASA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture mounted a project called Agristars that was to use Landsat images to improve farming. The results were disappointing to the individual farmer, Rickman said.
The latest effort benefits from both the Global Positioning Satellite, which helps pinpoint ground data, and choosing the right combination of light wavelengths to collect.
Where the human eye sees color in three basic bands of visible light -- red, green and blue, ATLAS can see in 15 bands -- including visible, thermal (heat) and near-infrared.
For the crop sensing project, Rickman and his colleagues settled on using two visible and two near-infrared bands.
Next week, Rickman and his team will present the findings at the
in Alabama. Farming physics
The mystery remaining is the process behind the imaging and its strong link to crop yields.
It starts with the fact that plants release water to cool themselves from the sun's radiation. "Fly a thermal sensor over that and the cooler plants are the ones that evaporated more water. That is a direct measure of the plant's thermodynamic efficiency," Rickman said. "That translates into a happier, healthier planet and more yield."
But the details of a plant's thermodynamic efficiency remain sketchy, he noted. And soil imaging is a whole different equation.
For now, the team wants to duplicate the experiments nationwide, and on a wider variety of crops. "Even if we never understand that physics, if we can make some things useful for the farmer," Rickman said.
Overall, "geo-spatial technologies" will affect agriculture and other natural resource industries on Earth, says Wersinger. "NASA has been a world pioneer in geo-spatial technologies," he said. "Images of Earth from space will change the way we do business on its surface."
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