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Project Overview

Why we are doing this:

A hundred years ago, George Lawrence took a large panorama from a kite over San Francisco to document the destruction of a 1906 earthquake.

A 100 years later, satellite imagery can provide similar assessment of destruction from natural disasters over a large swath of land within a certain period of time. That time can range from near real time to a week depending on the abiltity of the spacecraft to schedule an overflight and meteorological conditions. We believe that a relatively cheap camera on a small helium balloon could eventually provide similar type of data in a very short amount of time. We also believe that the infrastructure now exists to enable the preview of that information by a larger set of people thereby increasing the likelihood of improving search and rescue efforts.

In disasters of enormous proportion such as Hurricane Katrina, the Asian Tsunami, or the recent Pakistani earthquake, large swaths of terrain were suddenly rendered inaccessible or impossible to image. Satellite access time to these areas meant not having access to imagery for periods of time ranging from hours to days. The delay in access time to imagery is critical at the level of first time responders but

increasingly it is becoming obvious that the general population want similar information.

High altitude balloons can be deployed in a matter of hours and provide emergency remote sensing thereby enabling first responder's situational awareness and give adequate trajectories to rescuers. It would also enable the diffusion of imagery to a large segment of the population looking for information thereby reducing the strain on the telecommunication system of the affected area.

With these requirements in mind, we proposed to use a low cost Off the Shelf digital camera (COTS) called GEOCam to provide high resolution imagery from high altitude balloons in order to provide geographical information on large areas of interest.

Our outreach plan consisted in providing trajectory of the balloon on a Google Maps/Google Earth/Zoomify interface.

Our application for the HASP was eventually accepted.

The main difference between a project like ours and others where cameras are flown on UAVs is the ability to image large swath of lands. At 120,000 feet, the ability to cover the whole city of New Orleans becomes a matter of steering the camera rather than an issue of craft navigation. We also expect that the
impedance between the world's expectation of instantaneous news and the filtered first responders information stream will only get bigger. Solutions like ours would prevent this bottleneck of information, thereby providing everyone (including first responders) with clear and valuable information.

Our imaging capability should allow us to record data for about 600 kms (at 50 mph balloon speed) on a swath of land of about 20 km. HASP resided at up to 112,000 feet (or 36 km) up and we took a 15 degree tilt angle for our camera in order to take full advantage of the rotation induced by the balloon (Avoiding Murphy's Law).

We launched from Fort Sumner, New Mexico on September 4th, 2006. Here is what a our trajectory was foreseen to look like over New Mexico and Arizona. The same dimension can be mapped over other regions of interest for our type of project: New Orleans and the Mississippi coast and California.