A new camera on the International Space Station is expected to be available for wildland fire mapping, disaster management, and flood monitoring. The HTV-2 unmanned cargo ship that was launched by Japan on January 22 to resupply the Space Station is carrying the camera, a multispectral imager, that will take frequent images of the northern Great Plains and Rocky Mountain regions of the United States.
The primary purpose of the imager is to produce nitrogen application maps to improve fertilizer use, agriculture management zone decision support systems to improve nutrient and invasive species management, and rangeland management tools to improve livestock allocation and evaluation. But since end-users will have the ability to select specific geographical areas of interest and request the collection of imagery that will be downlinked, processed, and delivered within 1 to 2 days, the system is expected to be of benefit to wildfire and disaster managers.
The imager, called the International Space Station Agricultural Camera (ISSAC), will be installed in the Window Observation Research Facility by the crew onboard the Space Station. ISSAC was developed by students and faculty of the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, ND., in support of their Upper Midwest Aerospace Consortium research efforts.
The HTV-2 resupply craft will arrive at the Space Station on January 27 and will be grabbed by a remote control arm and berthed to one of the docking ports. Then over the next few days or weeks it will be moved to another port and will be connected to power and communications before the astronauts enter the craft to remove the camera and the rest of the cargo. Eventually the HTV-2 will be refilled with garbage and released from the Space Station to perish in a fiery plunge back through the atmosphere.
