The main goal of this project is to use aerial infrared photography to analyze the composition and health of the ground vegetation. A single stage rocket will carry a payload capsule with two DSLR cameras to the altitude of one mile. At the apogee of the flight, the payload will separate from the rocket (under its own parachute) and the cameras will start taking pictures of the ground in regular intervals (5 seconds). One of the cameras will operate in the visible spectrum while the other one will be modified to take pictures in the near infrared (IR) spectrum (above 720nm). The infrared camera is the main camera, the other camera is included mainly for a comparison of amount of usable information captured in IR and visible spectrum.
IR photographs generally provide more information about the ground vegetation than standard color photographs. For example most of the foliage has green color of very similar shades, however each type of foliage reflects a quite different amount of IR light. Thus, different types of trees that would virtually indistinguishable on color aerial photographs will display in a easy to differentiate shades of gray on IR photographs. See Figure 1 for a comparison of color photograph (the left frame) and IR photograph (the right frame) of the same scenery.
The photographs collected during the flight can be also used to determine the health of the ground vegetation. The healthy foliage reflects fair amount of IR light and thus appears as gray color on IR photographs. On the other hand, sick or dead foliage does not reflect the IR light almost at all and is recorded as very dark areas on IR pictures. Figure 2 illustrates this phenomena.
The experiment will be carried out with two main objectives in mind:
An up-to-date detailed description of the project can be found
in the Fligtht Readiness Review document in the Documents section.