Monday, November 14th, 2016
Researchers from UT Dallas and other universities developed geospatial science methods to help the Egyptian government determine how to avoid flooding in a coastal mountain region. The government wants to develop the area for tourism, but flash flooding and associated hazards have hampered efforts, according to Dr. May Yuan, Ashbel Smith professor of GIS. “We
Tuesday, November 8th, 2016
Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., have been working on the tricky problem of CubeSat transmission antennas, which must be small enough for these diminutive devices yet still transmit data through the huge expanses of space. “It’s like pulling a rabbit out of a hat,” said Nacer Chahat, a specialist in
Wednesday, November 2nd, 2016
Scientists produced the first global maps of human emissions of carbon dioxide ever made solely from satellite observations. The maps, based on data from NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) satellite and generated with a new data-processing technique, agree well with inventories of known carbon dioxide emissions. No satellite before OCO-2 was capable of measuring carbon
Monday, October 24th, 2016
A new study using NASA satellite data finds that tide gauges—the longest and highest-quality records of historical ocean water levels—may have underestimated the amount of global average sea-level rise that occurred during the 20th century. A research team led by Philip Thompson, associate director of the University of Hawaii Sea Level Center in the School
Tuesday, October 18th, 2016
Throughout the developing world, access to lifesaving and critical health products is hampered by “the last-mile problem”: the inability to deliver needed medicine from a city to rural or remote locations due to lack of adequate transportation, communication and supply chain infrastructure. To lessen this problem, the Rwandan government will begin using drones to make
Tuesday, October 11th, 2016
As Hurricane Matthew developed into a Category 4 hurricane that pummeled the Caribbean and southeastern United States, killing more than 1,000 people, disrupting electricity and other utilities to hundreds of thousands, and causing billions of dollars in economic damage, many of the world’s satellites and sensors were tuned to the storm, and recorded its path
Wednesday, September 28th, 2016
NASA is conducting low-level aircraft flights measuring greenhouse gases over the U.S. mid-Atlantic region for the CARbon Airborne Flux Experiment (CARAFE), which will measure the exchange of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane between Earth and the atmosphere. Water vapor, temperature and vertical wind measurements also will be taken. “The direct measurements of
Tuesday, September 20th, 2016
A laser scanner mounted to ships and submarine vehicles is providing high-resolution images of underwater features, including shipwrecks. The ULS-500 PRO scanner from 2G Robotics uses a high-sensitivity, low-noise sensor to reach ranges previously unattainable with laser scanning, resolving fine-scale dimensional features from distances as far as 20 meters. The system was used offshore during
Thursday, September 8th, 2016
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) released new 3-D topographic maps of Alaska on Sept. 1, 2016, in support of a White House Arctic initiative to inform better decision-making in the area. The 3-D digital elevation models (DEMs) are the first to come from the ArcticDEM project, which was created
Tuesday, August 16th, 2016
Construction of NASA’s Dellingr CubeSat is complete, and the satellite now is ready for environmental testing. Named for the god of dawn in Norse mythology, Dellingr will study the ionosphere—the outer region of Earth’s atmosphere populated by charged particles ionized by incoming solar radiation and magnetospheric particle precipitation. Slightly larger than a cereal box, Dellingr
