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NASA developing drones to monitor potential volcano eruptions
By Lurker,
NASA has partnered with other US agencies and a Colorado-based drone manufacturer to create a UAV-based system to observe volcanoes for indications of what otherwise might be unexpected, catastrophic eruptions for local communities.
NASA has long been interested in deploying drones to replace human monitors and small aircraft habitually used for near-range examination of volcano activity and for gathering evidence of approaching eruptions. Tipped off to those by data collected with sensors
Wild New Paper Suggests Earth's Tectonic Activity Has an Unseen Source
By Lurker,
Earth is far from a solid mass of rock. The outer layer of our planet – known as the lithosphere – is made up of more than 20 tectonic plates; as these gargantuan slates glide about the face of the planet, we get the movement of continents, and interaction at the boundaries, not least of which is the rise and fall of entire mountain ranges and oceanic trenches.
Yet there's some debate over what causes these giant slabs of rock to move around in the first place.
Amongst the many hypothe
New research strengthens link between glaciers and Earth's 'Great Unconformity'
By Lurker,
New research provides further evidence that rocks representing up to a billion years of geological time were carved away by ancient glaciers during the planet's "Snowball Earth" period, according to a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The research presents the latest findings in a debate over what caused the Earth's "Great Unconformity"—a time gap in the geological record associated with the erosion of rock up to 3 miles thick in areas across the globe.
Map the Oceans, To Save Earth’s Climate
By Lurker,
It is worth repeating that scientists know more about Mars, Venus, and the dark side of the moon than they know of Earth’s ocean depths. To date, less than 20 percent of the ocean floor has been mapped—13 percent in just the past four years. But scientists would like to map it all by 2030. It’s an essential undertaking, but it’s going to take dedicated effort, public support, and government funding. Such a project can be accomplished only through dedicated global cooperation.
The payoff sta
Moving Beyond the Geospatial Machine Learning Hype
By ckamusoko,
Land cover classification remains challenging. However, more very high-resolution images are available to create quality reference data. In addition, efforts to improve transparency and accountability in the machine learning model are becoming an important research topic. I have published a book on ‘Data-centric Explainable Machine Learning for Land Cover Classification: A Practical Guide in R.’ The book is for those interested in improving land cover classification using a data-centric explaina
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Hello! Hello! Join us on Wednesday [GIS DAA] for a zoom webinar as we discuss "The Future of GIS: Emerging Technologies and Global Impact in Different Sectors" and "GIS for Sustainable Development." Our event will feature two distinguished key speakers, senior specialists in the field, who will enlighten us with their insights and expertise. Save the date and stay tuned for more details on this exciting opportunity to explore the cutting-edge advancements and societal applications of Geographic Information Systems. Here is the registration link: https://shorturl.at/f5W68 See you there! #IRESexperience -
Sometimes you need to create a satellite navigation tracking device that communicates via a low-power mesh network. [Powerfeatherdev] was in just that situation, and they whipped up a particularly compact solution to do the job. As you might have guessed based on the name of its creator, this build is based around the ESP32-S3 PowerFeather board. The PowerFeather has the benefit of robust power management features, which makes it perfect for a power-sipping project that’s intended to run for a long time. It can even run on solar power and manage battery levels if so desired. The GPS and LoRa gear is all mounted on a secondary “wing” PCB that slots directly on to the PowerFeather like a Arduino shield or Raspberry Pi HAT. The whole assembly is barely larger than a AA battery. It’s basically a super-small GPS tracker that transmits over LoRa, while being optimized for maximum run time on limited power from a small lithium-ion cell. If you’re needing to do some long-duration, low-power tracking task for a project, this might be right up your alley. https://hackaday.com/2024/10/17/tiny-lora-gps-node-relies-on-esp32/
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Multiple motors or servos are the norm for drones to achieve controllable flight, but a team from MARS LAB HKU was able to a 360° lidar scanning drone with full control on just a single motor and no additional actuators. Video after the break. The key to controllable flight is the swashplateless propeller design that we’ve seen a few times, but it always required a second propeller to counteract self-rotation. In this case, the team was able to make that self-rotation work so that they could achieve 360° scanning with a single fixed LIDAR sensor. Self-rotation still needs to be slowed, so this was done with four stationary vanes. The single rotor also means better efficiency compared to a multi-rotor with similar propeller disk area. The LIDAR comprises a full 50% of the drone’s weight and provides a conical FOV out to a range of 450m. All processing happens onboard the drone, with point cloud data being processed by a LIDAR-inertial odometry framework. This allows the drone to track and plan its flight path while also building a 3D map of an unknown environment. This means it would be extremely useful for indoor or underground environments where GPS or other positioning systems are not available. All the design files and code for the drone are up on GitHub, and most of the electronic components are off-the-shelf. This means you can build your own, and the expensive lidar sensor is not required to get it flying. This seems like a great platform for further experimentation, and getting usable video from a normal camera would be an interesting challenge. Single Rotor Drone Spins For 360 Lidar Scanning | Hackaday
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The fall update to Global Mapper includes numerous usability updates, processing improvements, and with Pro, beta access to the Global Mapper Insight and Learning Engine which contains deep learning-based image analysis tools. Global Mapper is a complete geospatial software solution. The Standard version excels at basic vector, raster, and terrain editing, with Global Mapper Pro expanding the toolset to support drone-collected image processing, point cloud classification and extraction, and many more advanced image and terrain analysis options. Version 26.0 of Global Mapper Standard focuses on ease-of-use updates to improve the experience and efficiency of the software. A Global Search acts as a toolbox to locate any tool within the program, and a source search in the online data streaming tool makes it easier to bring online data into the application. Updates for working with 3D data include construction site planning to keep all edited terrain for a flattened site within a selected area and the ability to finely adjust the vertex position of 3D lines in reference to terrain in the Path Profile tool. Perhaps the largest addition to Global Mapper Pro v26.0 is the availability of the new Insight and Learning Engine which provides deep learning-based image analysis. Available with Global Mapper Pro for a limited time for users to test and explore, users can leverage built-in models for building extraction, vehicle detection, or land cover classification. These models can even be fine-tuned with iterative training to optimize the analysis for the data area.
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