GeoCam/HyperGeoCam - Two off-the-shelf Imagers for Rapid Response Remote Sensing Monitoring

Licence for Images and Panoramas produced during the course of the Geo-Cam project.

2011-04-27T13:01:00.000-07:00

All the photos and panoramas produced during the course of this project are under the following Creative Commons licence: Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0). In other words, you are free:

to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
to Remix — to adapt the work

Under the following conditions:

Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

These works should be attributed to:

John Yezak, Franky De La Garza, Pamela Withrow, Karen Villatoro, Raymond Mendoza, Jay Gerber, Sara Guest, Angelo Bianchini, Randy Doolittle, Ramon Rivera, Pedro Davalos, Igor Carron

If the work is to be referenced in a scientific publication, or if any of the photos or panoramas are to be used in a scientific publication, please use the following citation:

"Geo-Cam, an Off-the-shelf Imager for Rapid Response Remote Sensing Monitoring", John Yezak, Franky De La Garza, Pamela Withrow, Karen Villatoro, Raymond Mendoza, Jay Gerber, Sara Guest, Angelo Bianchini, Randy Doolittle, Ramon Rivera, Pedro Davalos, Igor Carron, Workshop on Unmanned Airborne Vehicle Imagery for Domestic Emergency Response & Natural Resource Survey: Deployment, Operations, & Applications, Lafayette, LA. Dec 13-14th, 2006.

Double Bummer, Hyper-GeoCam worked only for 20 minutes

2007-09-12T16:00:00.000-07:00

For some reason this is the last image we obtained from Hyper-GeoCam. The balloon was only about 1 km up.

Bummer, GeoCam is out !

2007-09-11T16:10:00.001-07:00

The mud did not do it. It looks like the mechanical finger did not work as intended and we have only one photo of the flight: the tarmac.

The file listing on the SD card clearly shows that on July 27th, at integration, the mechanism for shotting the camera was working but that the day before the launch and the launch day, whenever GeoCam would be activated it would take only one picture. Bummer.

We are looking at Hyper-GeoCam now. The 16 GB card is so large that when looking at the file directory through the USB 1.1 connector we cannot see the .RAW images until the camera downloads all of them which takes a certain amount of time. Initially we were thinking that camera had not taken any shots.

Ouch, GeoCam fell into the mud

2007-09-11T09:41:00.001-07:00

As noted by the HASP folks, one of our payload fell into the mud. We just got the cameras this morning and found out it was GeoCam. Hyper-GeoCam is fine. Now we need to open the boxes and find out if there is anything in either of them....

Landing in the Mud

2007-09-11T07:27:00.000-07:00

From Greg Guzik:

September 4, 2007: HASP 2007 RECOVERY SUCCESSFUL: HASP was successfully
recovery from a freshly irregated farm field near Poston, AZ during the morning of September 3. In the words of one of the CSBF managers, "You had a very soft landing!" The recovery crew returned HASP to Ft. Sumner by late afternoon of September 4, where we had a first look at the landing damage. Almost all of the student payloads appeared to have suffered very little injury during landing and recovery. The recovery crew removed most of the small payloads from the fiberglass extension booms and dismounted the UAH, MSU and ULL large payload prior to dragging HASP out of the field. They even managed to fish out from the mud one of the TAMU cameras that had broken off during landing. The HASP electronics system appeared very clean with no obvious evidence of water damage or extensive mud intrusion into the interior. Once HASP is returned to LSU next week, we will be able to do a more through assessment.

Images of the Recovery can be found here
[http://laspace.lsu.edu/hasp/images/2006-2007/09-04-07]

College Station, HASP has landed.

2007-09-03T01:43:00.000-07:00

From the HASP website:

CURRENT HASP STATUS 08:15 UTC September 3, 2007:

The HASP flight was terminated at 1:52 am today (7:52 UTC)
near Poston, AZ (near the California border).  The flight
had 14 hours and 22 minutes of float and lasted close to
19 hours.

From the GPS tracking site, that would be about 6.55 miles away from the California border. Congratulations to the HASP team.

what a beautiful view

2007-09-02T13:02:00.000-07:00

From 120,000 feet.

It's up

2007-09-02T10:27:00.000-07:00

Greg Guzik said:

HASP was launched this morning at 7:12 am Mountain time (13:12 UTC). The launch was almost perfect and the payload is working well. Currently, HASP is approaching 30,000 feet altitude.

Ready to launch

2007-09-02T03:11:00.000-07:00

From Greg Guzik:

HASP is now in the pickup process and we should be heading out to the launch pad shortly. No thunderstorms in the area and the winds are looking very good. We anticipate a launch sometime around 7:00 am Mountain time.

Fingers crossed.

Maybe tomorrow ?

2007-09-01T07:41:00.000-07:00

Greg just sent this:

The HASP launch has been scrubbed for today. The low altitude wind profile remained unacceptable with winds exceeding 10 knots. On the positive side the next two days are launch opportunities. Thus, we will begin this show again at 3:00 am tomorrow Sunday, September 2.

HASP2007 launch today ?

2007-09-01T01:15:00.000-07:00

From Greg Guzik:

HASP will make a launch attempt tomorrow, Saturday September 1, 2007. The anticipate launch time is 7:30 am Mountain time (i.e. 13:30 UTC), but this could be earlier or later depending upon weather and readiness. The HASP team will arrive at the flight line at about 2:30 am and pickup is scheduled for about 3:30 am. Attached here is our working pre-launch timeline. This will give you an idea of what should be happening at what time. The real times for these events will very likely not correspond exactly with the times listed in the chart.

As I have the time, I will be posting status updates on the main page of the HASP website. You can also monitor the CosmoCam video which will be available on and off during flight prep. You can also view CSBF video and tracking at http://towerfts.csbf.nasa.gov/

Our fingers are doubly crossed.

Thank you Highly qualified HASP personnel !

2007-08-29T23:59:00.000-07:00

From the HASP announcement page:

August 28, 2007: HASP MECHANICAL INTEGRATION: The primary event today was mechanically attaching HASP to the mini-SIP frame and control system. In addition, the mini-SIP was prepared for flight and initial communication tests between HASP and the mini-SIP were successful. Finally, the Hyper-GEOCAM group requested a configuration change to their camera. Highly qualified HASP personnel were able to open the delicate Hyper-GEOCAM payload box and perform the requested change (see daily images).

HASP weather estimates

2007-08-29T14:00:00.000-07:00

From Greg Guzik:

Today's weather briefing indicates strong winds building over the weekend and lasting to mid-week next week. Our only near term launch opportunity will be dawn on Saturday, September 1. If we can not make that launch, then the next opportunity may not be until Wednesday or Thursday next week. Thus, we are now planning to complete the compatibility testing on Friday, August 31 and look at launching HASP at dawn on Saturday, September 1.

Tomorrow morning, CSBF will be launching a test of the 37 heavy balloon. You should be able to follow this launch from the CSBF website at http://www.csbf.nasa.gov/ . The scheduled launch time for the 37H is 7:30 am.

HASP 2006 on video and HASP 2007 on schedule

2007-08-28T01:06:00.000-07:00

Found two videos of the HASP 2006, taken from the CosmoCam a webcam embarked on our HASP flight, enjoy:

The news from HASP 2007:

CURRENT HASP STATUS 13:10 UTC August 27, 2007: Mike Stewart and Greg Guzik have arrived at the flightline in Ft. Sumner, New Mexico. Today will be devoted to locateing all the HASP equipment, unpacking, setting up our control system, and assembling / checking the HASP ballooncraft. So far the weather here has been clear and pleasant, but it is too early to make any reliable predictions about launch
opportunities.

GeoCam and Hyper-GeoCam are ready to fly.

2007-08-11T02:56:00.001-07:00

We passed the qualification and are currently on-board HASP 2007. Stay tuned. Thank you John.

Integration of our new payloads will take place

2007-06-07T07:34:00.000-07:00

in Palestine, TX on July 27th.

The stickiness of panoramic views

2007-01-01T12:28:00.000-08:00

Roland Piquepaille did an entry on his blog about us. It is located here and here. It seems to have led to other people noticing this site like the Digital Photography Review. Both entries are leading different types of people to our site. The interesting part of these statistics figures is the stickiness of the panorama site on the two crowds. The ratio between page views and visits is pretty high at about 3.6 to 4.0 according to Google Analytics.

New Mexican View

2006-12-21T09:17:00.000-08:00

This is what the large panorama looks like. When you create it as a PSB file (Photoshop) using the latest version of Autopano Pro, it is about 51 GB large. It is taking time for us to open it and save it in a format that is viewable on the web (Zoomify).

Hyper-GeoCam

2006-12-21T08:02:00.000-08:00

We just sent a proposal to LSU to fly on the second HASP flight with a modification of the current camera. We are now aiming to build a cheap hyperspectral imager.

Orders of Magnitude Resolution Estimation for Digital Cameras at High Altitude

2006-12-21T04:44:00.000-08:00

One of the reason for our successful flight is linked to the quality of our photographs. When flying at 36 km altitude, we are roughly at one tenth the altitude of either the International Space Station (ISS) or imaging satellites. For cameras similar to ours, shots taken from the ISS have therefore 10 times less the resolution. Case in point, the LUECKE sign near Bastrop, TX. This sign was used by NASA to evaluate the resolution of astronaut acquired photographs from the ISS.

Calculations show an equivalent of 27 to 32 m for a pixel. The same sign can be seen on Google Maps here. Our previous comparison with Google Maps shows a 1 m resolution for a pixel or imagery details like this one.

Sites and Projects we like

2006-12-20T03:21:00.000-08:00

* The Global Connection Project: a project with CMU, Google and NASA Ames aimed at using a panorama approach to stiching photos together to produce imagery in case of natural disasters. This is pretty much our approach. They started before us but we just stumbled on their site recently.
* the Multi motif Stratospheric experiment: A team of swedish students who will be performing an experiment similar to ours. But they also have access to a rocket.
* StratoCat: a comprehensive and up-to-date site on high altitude balloons worldwide.
* Post storm imagery from the NOAA. Look out! the whole database of images is about 10 GB.
* Astronaut acquired photographs.
* Another experiment called GeoCam that flew a set of cameras on board the Space Shuttle in 1993.
* NOAA Balloon flights.
* Kite Aerial Photography.
* CU Spaceflight balloons.

Off to Louisiana

2006-12-13T03:11:00.000-08:00

Some of us will be attending a UAV workshop for disaster monitoring and present a poster of our work doing panoramas. The presentation is available here. We will also send a proposal for the next HASP flight before the end of the week.

Space Vantage Points

2006-11-09T14:35:00.000-08:00

When Nadar went up his balloon 150 years ago and took the first aerial photo, he triggered Jules Vernes into writing "Five weeks in a balloon".
The first panoramic view of a natural disaster was taken one hundred years ago after the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake using a kite.

The first photo taken from space was obtained in 1946, from a V2 rocket and the first panorama in space was taken two years later.

Sixty years later, thanks to the HASP platform, we took one of the longest panoramic view from a high altitude balloon. This is mainly due to our ability to store large amount of data in common cameras (4GB).

Very Large Panoramas are coming up

2006-10-17T05:23:00.000-07:00

We have used the Autopano software to stitch together very large panoramas made up of most of the usable images taken by GeoCam during the HASP balloon flight. Out of 4 GB of memory, there was a minimum of about 2 GB of data that could be used and stitched nicely. The remaining pool of images has too many clouds to allow for scene recognition. The largest panorama is some type of record being 3.7 GB large. However it is sparse and therefore is much smaller when it comes to actual pixel counts (100s of MB). They should be up soon.

Comparing Satellite Imagery and GeoCam Data

2006-10-04T05:39:00.000-07:00

Here is a comparison of images taken by GeoCam (at 36 km up with a Canon Camera) and those taken by Satellites and featured on Google Maps. This is just before entering Moriarty, NM:

and a frame taken by GeoCam at the same scale

The level of detail afforded by GeoCam is comparable to the next best resolution provided by Google Maps.

Pedro has estimated that one pixel on GeoCam is about 3.3 feet. Potentially, GeoCam could be provide coverage for a larger swath of land as, in this flight it was tilted at 20 degrees angle from Nadir.

More on that later.