Lincoln (Neb.) - Nov. 21, 2000 - Sometimes it pays to dream.
That can be especially true for scientists and it can also be true for pilots (as long as they're not airborne). Sometimes a dream can turn into a reality with widespread practical benefits.
That is just what is happening for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's remote-sensing program and the University of Nebraska at Omaha Aviation Institute. According to Ram Narayanan, a professor of electrical engineering at UNL associated with UNL's Center for Electro-Optics, it was a dream that led to a $450,000 National Science Foundation Epscor grant that will purchase an airplane and establish the University of Nebraska Remote-Sensing Facility.
"We were dreaming and we thought, 'Let's see if we can get our own aircraft,'" Narayanan said, recalling a brainstorming session among some remote-sensing scientists last year.
"We have a strong remote-sensing program at UNL consisting of about 30 faculty members spread across various departments and colleges, and we're very competitive with other institutions in the breadth, scope and depth of the work that we do. We also recognized that UNO has a very strong program in aviation science and technology. We met with them and they were very supportive of cooperating to pursue the grant. We combined the strengths of the two institutions and came up with a unique specialty that will be a resource not only for Nebraska, but for the entire country."
The airplane acquired as part of the grant will give UNL's remote-sensing scientists a ready-at-hand airborne platform that they've lacked in the past, and will provide the UNO Aviation Institute with advanced aviation technology to relate to upper-level aviation students.
In remote sensing, scientists gather information about a target from a remote location - a boom mounted on a truck or other vehicle, an aircraft or a spacecraft - using sensors operating on different electromagnetic wavelengths. The information can be used, for example, to monitor soil moisture or crop stress.
UNL scientists have a boom on a unique field vehicle called "Goliath" and they have ready access to satellite images, but until now they've had to go to NASA with flight requests to place their sensors on NASA aircraft - a process that can sometimes take a year or more. The system has allowed the UNL remote-sensing program to do good work, but it doesn't allow a lot of flexibility, said Donald Rundquist, professor and director of the Center for Advanced Land Management Information Technologies in the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources, and co-author of the grant with Narayanan and Brent Bowen, professor and director of the UNO Aviation Institute.
"With our own aircraft and our own sensors, we'll be able to collect the data we want, when we want, in the way we want to, using the spectral bands that we want," Rundquist said. "It's going to give us a great deal of flexibility in collecting data."
Bowen said the aircraft presents new and valuable opportunities for the Aviation Institute and its students.
"This will provide great flight experiences for our advanced students," he said. "The researchers will want to overfly precise courses and that will be a great learning opportunity for our future professional pilots and administrators. The grant will also enable us to hire a person to maintain the aircraft and work on other projects at the Aviation Institute. It will be a nice employment opportunity for someone and it will be a very good complement to the institute."
In the first year of the grant, the institute used grant funds to identify and purchase the aircraft, a single-engine Piper Saratoga. The plane came with six seats, but the four in the rear will be removed and the plane further modified to accommodate the experimental sensor technology being developed by Narayanan, Rundquist and colleagues.
"We're interested in how to calibrate aircraft sensors and that involves having known targets on the ground. We can fly over those targets and better calibrate those sensors," Rundquist said. "The folks at the Agricultural Research and Development Center near Ithaca have been kind enough to give us some concrete floors (of old ammunition bunkers) painted in a certain way with certain levels of reflectance that will be useful for that calibration. The purpose is to understand what we see with Goliath, the aircraft and satellite systems, and see how it all ties together.
"Two words describe what we want to do: 'research' and 'application.'
The aircraft gives us research capabilities that we haven't had, and
we're interested in developing practical applications of remote-sensing
technology that hopefully we'll be able to spin off into the private
sector once we've done the research and development."
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