July 1 – Earth Search Sciences, Inc., a commercial provider of the hyperspectral technology, has announced that it has been awarded a contract by the Naval Research Laboratory of the U.S. Navy to assess the coastline of Virginia using the company’s breakthrough remote sensing instrument in an airborne survey.
Terms for the Navy contract with Earth Search were not disclosed. The company said that the twice-daily — high tide and low tide — flights at 8,000 feet have already begun and that the project is part of a larger, ongoing relationship with the Navy in which the results of airborne hyper spectral remote sensing complement satellite data.
Hyperspectral sensing is the breakthrough imaging technology so precise it can differentiate from an airborne vantage point a field of oats from a field of barley — and determine if the field is infested with insects or damaged by nitrogen depletion — or show clearly whether the metal object under a tree is a car or a tank. The technology can detect changes in soil composition, vegetal stress and chemical toxins.
While existing satellite and remote sensing technology provides the ability to identify objects primarily by shape or spectral response, the revolutionary hyperspectral imaging, by measuring the degree of spectral reflectance of solar energy across the spectrum and creating a digital fingerprint, can map specific minerals, compounds or any other surface objects. In addition to security applications, Earth Search hyperspectral applications are used for environmental and oil and mineral surveys.
