Endeavour Carries an Agricultural Camera

Students from the University of North Dakota have designed and built a special type of camera, called Agricultural Camera (also known as AgCam), which is currently carried by the space shuttle Endeavour during the STS-126 mission to the International Space Station. The camera is meant to provide pictures of crops, forests and other plant-covered areas from above, and send them to a ground based data collection center from where they will be accessed by people via Internet.

 

When it reaches the space station, it will be installed in place by the astronauts, but after switch-on, the command will be passed on to the students, who will control it remotely. The visible and infrared light images taken by the AgCam will mainly focus on the northern Great Plains and Rocky Mountain regions. According to AgCam program director, George Seielstad, quoted by UniverseToday, "The beauty of the AgCam is the combination of features it has to provide important data to a wide variety of people. Plus, students have the opportunity to do real engineering and provide valuable data to protect our environment."

 

The photographs taken by the camera will have a resolution of 15-20 meters, higher than similar devices. "We're getting two spectral bands, near infrared and red (in the visible)," explained Seielstad "but the difference between those two are the most critical for determining the health of the vegetation of any kind, be it crops, prairie, grassland, pasture, or a forest. So those two bands are critical. The space station comes over sometimes more than once a day in a particular area. But routinely, it comes over at least two or three times a week. Even if it's cloudy one of those times you're getting an image a week, and that hasn’t been available before," he added.

 

"The best thing is the change of getting an image regularly instead of only every once in awhile. It will be like getting a motion picture of your crop rather than the snapshot two or three times a season," shared the scientist on the monitoring abilities of the AgCam. Also, it will help prevent or escape from natural disasters, due to its constant monitoring of flood or wild fire occurrences.