NASA RESEARCH INternship
NASA Ames internship involving selecting a world challenge to research and developing an engineering proposal on how to address the issue. The team selected working on the challenge of drought throughout the US and the world, and proposed a drone system to monitor and advise response to the drought.
Graphic Depicting Project Proposal
Challenge
This project was part of an internship in which the task was to identify an emerging global issue and propose a solution. This project focused on addressing the issue of droughts: due to increased global temperatures, droughts are becoming more common and severe. Climate change most directly links to droughts through increased evaporation, decreased snowpack, and more extreme weather patterns. Droughts come at the cost of economic damage, food shortage concerns, and poverty. Although satellites can reliably gather broad and generalized drought data, having more precise instruments would be beneficial to more accurately diagnose and treat drought conditions.
Action
This project involved collaboratively researching the issue to determine what room there was for innovation, proposing a solution, and engineering a design proposal for how to solve the problem. The research involved interviews with NASA employees, searching through databases, and conducting broad internet searches to locate relevant information. The engineering design and implementation state involved investigating UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) types, researching the desired instruments with which to equip the UAV, and engineering a way to integrate a final drone proposal to submit to NASA.
Hyperspectral Camera Visualization Made in Blender
Results
The project culminated in a research proposal which has been officially published at NASA and is available at https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20220014853.
When constructed, the demonstrated drone design would have a fully loaded range of 89-105 km. The drone would be equipped with a hyperspectral and high-resolution RGB camera to measure chlorophyll levels in leaves, and a LiDAR and FLIR C2 Thermal Imaging Camera to record the soil moisture and groundwater levels. The proposed design would also include a neural network to analyze the data without the need for tedious human involvement. The drone has the anticipated impact of permitting farmers to monitor their fields in drought conditions in order to determine which areas need the most water, thus permitting more focused water allocation and less waste. Additionally, the drone could be used to monitor the conditions in drought as a whole to provide the public with general information on how to best combate and survive water shortages.
Drone Concept Animation Created in Blender
