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Exploring Beneath the Waves – presented by Science@NASA
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Oceans cover over 70% percent of Earth’s surface and profoundly influence our planet’s atmosphere, weather, and climate.
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However, uncovering the many secrets hidden beneath the ocean’s waves presents unique challenges for researchers,
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and requires specific technology to observe what humans can’t see.
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NASA technologists are developing sensors that can improve measurements of Earth’s oceans,
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creating new instruments to study aspects of our home planet we haven’t before been able to research.
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Imaging what’s below the ocean surface requires the development a new instrument capable of improving the information available to scientists.
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Ved Chirayath, a scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center says,
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“Images of objects under the surface are distorted in several ways, making it difficult to gather reliable data about them.”
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Chirayath has a technology solution, it’s called fluid lensing.
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He says, “Refraction of light by waves distorts the appearance of undersea objects in a number of ways.
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When a wave passes over, the objects seem bigger due to the magnifying effect of the wave.
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When the trough passes over, the objects look smaller; fluid lensing is the first technique to correct for these effects.”
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Without correcting for refraction, it’s impossible to determine the exact size or extent of objects under the water’s surface,
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how they’re changing over time, or even precisely where they are.
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Chirayath developed a special camera called FluidCam that uses fluid lensing to see beneath the waves
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and capture terabytes worth of 3D images at ½ cm resolution, snapping imagery from aboard an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV).
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The key to fluid lensing lies in the unique software Chirayath developed to analyze the imagery collected by FluidCam.
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He explains that “This software turns what would otherwise be a big problem into an advantage,
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not only eliminating distortions caused by waves but using their magnification to improve image resolution.”
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He is focusing FluidCam on coral reefs,
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the health of which have been significantly degraded due to pollution, over-harvesting, increasing ocean temperatures and acidification, among other stressors.
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To understand how the reefs are affected by environmental and human pressures, and to work with resource managers to help identify how to sustain reef ecosystems,
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researchers need to determine how much healthy reef area exists now.
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Fluid lensing could help researchers establish a high resolution baseline of global reef area worldwide,
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by augmenting datasets from multiple NASA satellites and airborne instruments.
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This effort will help identify the effects of environmental changes on these intricate, life-filled ecosystems.
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Chirayath and his team designed special software to teach supercomputers how different conditions, such as different sizes of waves, affect the images captured.
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The computers combine data from multiple airborne and satellite datasets and identify objects in the images accordingly,
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distinguishing between what is and is not coral and mapping it with 95% greater accuracy than any previous efforts.
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He says, “We created an observation and training network called NeMO-Net,
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through which scientists and members of the public can analyze imagery captured by FluidCam and other instruments to help classify and map coral in 3D.
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This is the database we use to train our supercomputer to perform global classifications.”
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Chirayath is working toward a space-based FluidCam.
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From orbit, the camera could map coral reef ecosystems globally and help researchers better understand the overall health of coral reefs.
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To learn more about the amazing technologies NASA uses to explore our planet, visit science.nasa.gov.