What Can Satellites See?
August 22, 2023 - Written By Nicole Pepper
The Big Show live radio interview
Date: August 22, 2023
Interviewee: Dr. Alyssa Whitcraft, Executive Director of NASA Acres
Interviewer: David Geiger, The Big Show
Listen to the live recording:
Read the Interview Transcript:
Bob Quinn
Ah, 12 -12 on a big show clock, moving along on a big show today. Markets are moving down, we're going to talk more markets ahead, also we'll look at weather, but David has a special guest on the telephone line with us today.
David Geiger
Yeah, thanks Bob. We had a question here on The Big Show. What exactly can satellites see and is there a way for cameras in space? To help out farmers know what's going on. Dr. Alyssa Whitcraft is executive director of the NASA Acres consortium She's here on the line with us.
Thanks so much for joining and by the way that NASA Acres consortium is something that was new launched in April. Thanks so much Dr. Alyssa for joining us and can you kind of give us a couple sentences about that consortium?
Alyssa Whitcraft
I'm happy to be here. Thank you for the invitation. So yeah, NASA Acres is this new US focus agriculture and food security consortium. NASA surprisingly to a lot of people has been working in agriculture for 50 years now.
The first satellites launched in 1972 were immediately used for seeing what was happening around the world with the crop. And so now we're trying to take the value of those satellite data. They've evolved, they're a lot better.
We have new models, machine learning, AI, all these kind of different things, and bring the value of them specifically down to US farmers and to the US agri -food system.
David Geiger
I appreciate that, because I was basically right into the direction I wanted to go, and we have right now a situation where the National Agricultural Statistics Service sends out surveys of what exactly type of crops farmers are planting, but you guys can kind of tell from the space what's going on out there as well, can't ya?
Alyssa Whitcraft
Yeah, we can, but just like with sort of any model out there, that model has to learn. And we learn from the ground data that exists. So, yeah, we have images, but our ability to separate wheat from barley or corn from soybean is contingent upon our ability to understand what that looks like in each region.
And so some ways that I tend to explain this is pretend you've never ever seen fruit before and somebody hands you a fruit basket and says there's apples, oranges, bananas, blueberries and peaches in here, but doesn't tell you which one's which. And then they put them out on a table and they say, okay, pick the apple and you go, oh shoot, I know it's fruit.
I know it's a crop, but I don't know which one. And so all the models that we have with satellite data work just the same way, except the sensors are in space rather than our eyeballs.
David Geiger
Right, how do you end up training them in that way then? Because you know, if you're that far away, sometimes it could just look like a big green blob. How do you kind of get down and teach them how to work with that?
Alyssa Whitcraft
That's another really good question. Different satellites have really different characteristics and some of them, if you think about Google Earth when you look at that now, a lot of that’s aerial photography these days but that platform was originally built upon Landsat missions which we as u .s. taxpayers paper and it returns about three and a half billion four billion dollars per year to our economy which is amazing. But now those kind of high resolution images you can make out quite a bit of detail we're not talking about lead we're not talking about you know the license plate on it on your car anything like that, what we are talking about is our ability we can even see the texture in rows we can see when harvesting is taken at taking place uh... we're working in Ukraine with about ten feet by ten feet so a hundred square feet within one one single pixel one single bit of data and we can even see exploit exploded and unexploded ordinances in in Ukraine right now
David Geiger
Oh wow.
Alyssa Whitcraft
It's pretty amazing what we can see, but it's certainly not kind of like tech of the future where we're able to see like a ladybug growing on the plant.
David Geiger
Wow, we're speaking to Dr. Alyssa Whitcraft, she's executive director of the NASA Acres Consortium. Is there a public, you were mentioning Google Earth, Google Map type stuff. Is there a public site where folks can kind of check out some of this data? I know there's some sites where people will actually spend spare time and help out by determining it's this or it's that. Is there something like that going on with you guys over there?
Alyssa Whitcraft
So it depends on what you want to look at. So we certainly have, we are kind of an outgrowth of a program called NASA Harvest, which started about six years ago and it was sort of the whole NASA effort around food security and agriculture worldwide.
NASA Harvest still exists. It's just focused on sort of international ag markets and trade, whereas this one, NASA Acres, it's very focused on the US. So we have built under NASA Harvest some tools that I think are really useful.
One of them is Harvest Portal and Harvest to Market. So if you Google NASA Harvest Portal, NASA Harvest to Market, things like that, you'll be able to look at sort of what's happening in agriculture. That won't be the direct satellite imagery though, those are sort of the derived products that tell you the condition or it tells you the crop type area, things like that. If you want to see what the satellite imagery looks like right now a great place to go look at that is Earth Explorer. So if you just search Earth Explorer that’s a visualization tool to see the most recent satellite images that have been captured over your region. But if you want to see sort of what’s happening in terms of crop condition, NASA Harvest Portal is a good place to look.
David Geiger
Good to know, Earth Explorer. Hey, what’s the outlook here in terms of getting some of this information into your day-to-day reports. Say you have the Iowa Crop Progress Report out from the National Agriculture Statistics Service. NASA Satellite estimates, when do you think something like that may be popping up.
Alyssa Whitcraft
That’s a great question. I mean so at the national level, the NASS, the whole national office, they use satellite data, they use it for their yield forecasts, it’s one piece of information that they use together with the state surveys for corn and soybean principally at this point. We are discussing expanding that to some of the other crops that are really important, commodity crops, like cotton and wheat, supporting NASS in that domain. We have models that are very mature with that already.
But in terms of the State offices, it’s less clear to me at this point how much use of satellite data there is in the difference offices, since they are all really unique. So it’s something that we would like to accomplish with in program is having some of that outreach with some of these different offices.
We are mostly meeting with different farmers and growers associations, farm representation groups and hoping that if they establish that as a real priority and need, then perhaps they can help put us into contact with the different crop progress reporters the NASS data officials to see if what we do can support.
David Geiger
Dr. Alyssa Whitcraft, Executive Director of the NASA Acres Consortium, thanks so much for joining us.
Alyssa Whitcraft
Thank you so much for having me, have a great day.
David Geiger
Thank you, you too, we will be talking about this program, hopefully in the future as well.