 We're back, we're live, it's the one o'clock rock here on Monday. Our favorite science show, Research in Manoa, and we, you know, we introduce you to the research guys. In case you're wondering what's going on up there, it's Eric Belger. And he is a systems engineer at AIGP, and AIGP is the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, and that is going to be on the final, okay? Write it down. Okay. Welcome to the show, Eric. Thank you. So, we, we styled this electronic instrumentation is for everyone, or hot, it's a hot time on the planet tonight, finding the hot spaces everywhere and whatnot. Yep. So, you're into hot, H-O-T, not the opera theater, but the temperature. Right, that happened in the opera theater, but it's just a volunteer basis. This place pays my bills. So you have a, you have a system of satellites with mostly infrared cameras that travel all over the world, all around the world, and they take pictures and you find out what's hot where. Right. There have been a number of satellites up there, Landsat is one that people may even have heard of, because it's been taking pictures forever, but as they learned more about what they wanted to do, they came up with this idea for two satellites they called Aqua and Terra, and an instrument they called MODIS that would be dedicated to infrared observations, because they discovered there's a lot of things you can see in the infrared that reveal stuff about our planet. Now some of it's dedicated to vegetation and chlorophyll and all those sorts of things that I'm not that interested in, but one of the goals for this mission that the PIs where I work, put in for funding for was to identify things that are really hot on the surface of the earth, and by really hot I'm talking about maybe a thousand degrees or two thousand degrees centigrade. Yeah, at that point it almost doesn't matter, but Celsius, I actually think in Kelvin because I'm a physicist by training, but yes, it's called about 1200 degrees Celsius. We're talking about things that are the temperature of the lava, the lava lake, the Kilauea, surface flows, hot-burning fires, forest fires, yes, forest fires, grass fires, I think it burns either hot enough or in a large enough area. As we discovered with the system there are a number of other things that we can check out too. It turns out things don't need to be very large if they're really hot, so gas players from oil wells turn out to be extremely hot so even though they're not too large. Yeah, I'm guessing it's a couple thousand degrees. The slag from smelters, you know, they melt this stuff at thousands degrees. Copper. They take out either the copper or the steel, and what's left over is junk to them, but they have to let it cool off, so they just dump it in a big pile on the ground. Takes a while to cool. And yeah, and then we can see it. So, but you're looking for large areas, or and or, small areas that are hotter than the standard. Right, smaller and larger, not so hot. There's a limit. I think probably we can't go below about 600 degrees Celsius. It doesn't pick it up. Yeah, it just starts to merge with the background. Because you're flying way high. How high are you flying? I'd say I think it's about a thousand kilometers. It's not quite near Earth orbit, which all these small satellites are aiming for. That's about 500. This is way over the atmosphere. Yes, though part of the reason I think it's above the 500 is that if you're at 500, there's still enough atmosphere that you slowly decay in your orbit. So the things that they want to last, and these satellites have been up for good 16 years, they need them to be high enough that they don't slowly come down. Yeah, but let me put it in perspective, using infrared cameras, it doesn't come down for R&R, right? Nobody goes up to it and says, hi, I need to fix you. So it's been up there by itself 16 years taking pictures. Of course, the interpretation has changed. Maybe the scientific appreciation of it has changed. But the fact is that what's up there has been up there for 16 years. Now, putting into perspective, when I got a digital camera 16 years ago, I think it had maybe one megapixel, maybe a lot. Now they come 20, 30 megapixels. So for instance, they don't have a camera the way we think of it up there. They have this line detector and it scans along like this. So it's just a row of detectors and they just, so they get an image that's this wide and, you know, the height of the earth. Okay. And they just keep sending them down periodically when they hit ground stations. So our data means they pass over a ground station, right? They pass over an antenna and then they can send down what they have just do a dump on the ground station. And then the activity starts because then that flows to National Data Center that does all the data reduction. And you mentioned how what they do with it over the years has changed and that's true. In the beginning, they started with just a few things. And they actually they actually limited us to five math operations. But nowadays, they have us and 20 or 30 other things that they do with each of these images that come down. Okay, so so when it comes down, it's not in the form of an image or isn't it? You tell me before it comes out in a text report about what the device comes down as an image. Yeah. And the data center takes it and does math with it. And then they create reports that they send out. So we get a text report. That's just the list of spots they think are hot. And it simply says latitude, longitude. This is how hot we thought it was. And by the way, here's all the data from those channels. There's about five for infrared and one visible channel. As I recall, a degree in longitude or latitude is 60 miles. So you must be well within minutes rather than degrees. Oh, yes. So 300 meters. Yes, that's much that's minutes, minutes or even seconds, seconds, seconds. Now, we're talking about the measurement of what of the the Earth's surface, right, which is measured in degrees of longitude and latitude. Right. But within those degrees, you have like a clock, you have 60 minutes, 60 minutes in a given degree and then 60 seconds in a given minute. Right. So a second would be a really small, relatively speaking, right. So if you know, I think it's that a minute is an article miles at 6000 feet. So a second is 100 feet. That's so you can so you can get a report every every second. Yeah, a couple of seconds on the ground. So and that would cover 100 feet, probably more like 300 feet, 100 meters. Yeah. Okay, I'm sorry. Yeah, or even bigger. So as we pass over and this, it's actually a bit of an irony. If we had smaller pixels, then the signal would be so strong, it would overwhelm the instrument. And you'd have to make a different instrument. But when you would make a different instrument, if you could do the whole thing, if you could, right? But you think, oh, that's too bad. But you know, when you get lemons, make lemonade, it turns out that if we've got a pixel this size, and then this little spot that's really hot, these ratios that we calculate reveal that that pixel has something unusual going on in it. And we can get a pretty good idea of how much of that unusual, as long as everything else is just sort of normal. But that, that middle thing is really Well, could it be an aberration? Could it be that it's not accurate? Yes. And we have to watch out for that. One of the biggest concerns are reflection off the ocean of the sun. So we actually measure the angle the sun might be making. So that if it, if it looks like we're seeing the sun bouncing off the ocean, then we just throw that pixel out because it's pretty good. So that's, that's the old subtraction trick. You, you, you take the infrared picture, you take the regular photography, and then you subtract one from the other and you get the heat. Yeah, something like that. Yeah, I know that's not exactly plus a bit of a ratio because it turns out that you can, it turns out that the things we're looking at either regular ground temperature or these really hot things give about the same measurement in one infrared channel. But they give markedly different measurements in the other one. So therefore, when you ratio the two, it, if you will, once again, putting something to advantage, one of the channels doesn't really measure the temperature very well. And the other one does. And so we can see this exit temperature. One helps you understand the other one. Yeah. So it, but is it possible that you would get one pixel, one of that 300 feet? That's really hot. And then the next pixel, the next 300 feet, then it wouldn't be hot. Oh, certainly. So if you go over a kilo way, that crater is no more than a few hundred feet across. So there's one really that lava lake up there. Bang, it just jumps right out at us. And then the rest of the pixels don't. So we get a constant stream of those, although, obviously, when we first started, we didn't because there was nothing there. And I can actually look back in time and see how it slowly picked up both in number of pixels and the intensity of them. Here's a graphic. Let's see. What is this? Here we are. You brought graphics. So let's, you know, we have two graphics of the the Kilauea area. And what you're seeing there is the smaller locus of points is Halemama, the actual crater. And it's broad because there's certain accuracies and location and the fact that we look from different angles and the pixels get elongated and drawn out. But you can see it centers the red spot right there on the crater. The yellow square or rather green squares. Those green squares are the hot pot. Yeah, that's how big they are. Yep. And then off to the right there, I think our viewers may well recognize the attack on Pahoa. And that is this is from over a year ago. So this is sort of halfway through 2014 to 2015. And the flow was heading out toward Pahoa. I don't know if we have the other graphic, but there we are. And now this is from mid 2015 to today. It's changed. You can see it stopped attacking Pahoa. But now we've got it going down to the ocean again. So this is all from a satellite 600 miles above the earth. Yeah. Pretty good. And the miracles of modern technology. We've got Google Earth, you know, throwing it on Google Earth and left there. And actually, they're both Google Earth images. Yeah. But you're interposing the pixels on the one on the right on top of the data. Yeah. And then using clustering on the left just to give you an idea when you're looking at the site of where things might be interesting. So when it's when it's green, is that denote a particularly high temperature? I mean, is this color coded for temperature? No, this one is coded for just how many there are. So that's why it's red right at the center there. That's where there's a concentration of pixels. And you notice in the one on the right, there's some red areas that's I'm guessing that's where Puo is. So where you get the most of it. Yeah. And then, of course, it's headed off to the east. Down the mountain. Once it stopped attacking Pahoa, it spent a lot of time just sort of oozing out and spreading out up there. And that's that bit that's to the north and east. And then suddenly it turned around and headed back toward the ocean. And I would say the majority of that that part heading toward the ocean is just from the last couple of weeks. So how often does the satellite get around to taking a picture like this? It orbits the globe about 16 times a day. So we have to wait about a day to get complete coverage, but then we'll get complete coverage only at a certain time in the night from any one satellite. So for instance, on one day you might get all the nighttime coverage and then on another you get all the daytime coverage. But you come back during both day and night. Right. So we have two satellites and they're staggered. They're actually two hours before midnight and noon and two hours after midnight and noon. So we get four of these time periods and they're intermixed. So we actually get a revisit time on a particular spot in the globe maybe twice per day. Once a night and once a day. And like us, we're going to revisit this subject after a short break. Sometimes you have to revisit. You have to revisit here on Think Tech. We'll be right back. Hi, my name is Kim Lau and I'm the host of Hawaii Rising. You can watch me every other Monday at 4 p.m. Aloha, Howard Wigg. I am the proud host of Code Green, Think Tech Hawaii. I appear every other Monday at three in the afternoon. Do not tune in in the morning. My topic is energy efficiency. It sounds dry as heck, but it's not. We're paying five billion dollars a year for imported oil. My job is to shave that, shave that, shave that down in homes and buildings while delivering better comfort, better light, better air conditioning, better everything. So if you're interested in your future, you'd better tune in to me three o'clock every other Monday, Code Green Aloha and thank you very much. Okay, we're back real live with Eric Pilcher. He's a systems engineer at HIGP. That's the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology. From now on, I'm using only the acronym, yeah? HIGP. Thank you. Which is part of Southwest, the School of Ocean and Earth Science. And we concentrate on this in research of Manoa every single Monday at 1 p.m. So we have more pictures. Let's talk about pictures outside Hawaii, outside the U.S. What do we got? Okay, so here we have something that's timely. It's not clear as you can see from the map on the left. This is Brazil and the area to the top, the north, is the Amazon basin. You can actually see a bit of the river flow there. Now you can see how the fires follow the main river and the tributaries as people encroach into the rainforest, cutting and burning. Now most of those hot pixels, unlike the ones over our volcanoes, are all slash and burn agriculture. Here in Brazil and in Africa, you will see a lot of seasonal fires. They go in, they burn out the leftover stuff, and then they plant. Intentional. It's an agricultural. It's a way to clear. And certainly within the Amazon, they cut down and clear forests by burning. I mean in Hawaii, when I came to Hawaii, it was a regular business on the plantations to burn. And then, you know, a year or two ago, we heard a lot of fuss about it on Maui and people saying, bad idea, I can't do that. But really, I mean, from your point of view, A, is it a bad thing for the environment? And B, can your technology help us find out where they're doing this? So one of the original drivers for this was to study the amount of carbon that was being released in the atmosphere. The original funding came from NASA and NASA supported this effort all along. And the original grant was to look at how well we could study burning and how much it might contribute. Because we found that the energy that's released, either from fires, or from lava, or from man-made industrial events, is tied directly to how much you're burning and how much you're releasing. And carbon into the atmosphere. So in the case of trees or grass, yes, it's actually, there's going to be a linear relationship between the amount of energy that's released, which we can measure from this. Not only do we get the pixels and know the number of them, but we know their intensity as well. And we can relate that fairly directly to the amount of energy that's been released, and that's directly relatable to the amount of materials that you burn. Yeah. I don't know if you've done this, but it strikes me that there's a dynamic here. So you could say from, say, January 1st, 2016 to January 1st, 2017, we are burning more. We are having more hot spots, more burning, and therefore more carbon into the atmosphere. Right. You can certainly do that with this system. And nobody has yet, partly because the funding that we've received over the years is predominantly geared toward volcanology. But the system itself has been adopted by a number of people to get more information. And it's interesting, an interesting synergy here that the volcanologists were the first ones to think of the possibility of getting the energy output from burning, partly because they had done the basic physics with volcanoes and they knew that was probably could be carried over. But how long is these satellites going to stay in place? You know, because when they come down, somebody's going to say, oh, we got to do it again, but it's going to cost a lot more money because that's the way it works. And we have more sophisticated equipment and that costs more money. And then, you know, there's going to be a struggle to get them back. So right now you're in 7th Heaven. That's actually a wonderful image. You're in 7th Heaven, looking down on us. 7,000 kilometers. 8th Heaven is at 1200 kilometers. It's up there and it's working and you're getting all the street information. But how long are you going to stay up there before you hit a crisis? Yeah, with these satellites, they don't have to correct their orbit very much. The geosynchronous satellite, the GOES weather satellites, they have lifetimes because they carry a certain amount of fuels to adjust their positioning. Even though they have geosynchronous orbits, they drift around and they keep having to correct. Whereas these just go and they don't really care. Wherever they are, they know where they are. So as long as these keep functioning, they'll just keep going. They've been going for 15 years. They could probably go another 15, yes. Solar panels, obviously the solar panels are slowly wearing out from cosmic rays and things like that. And there could be a catastrophic failure in an instrument. Some kind of space, what do you call it, meteorite? Right, it could be a meteorite or even just the accumulated doses of radiation, finally fry something. Yeah. So you were talking before about, you know, the proliferation of satellites in our small satellites. And that I was going to comment on how people still are looking at new large satellites. But ever more, they're looking at replacing one large satellite with a huge number of small satellites. What's the analysis on that? Why are smaller ones better? The main thing you get from smaller satellites is a lot more flexibility and coverage. So with these satellites, they follow a set course. There's only two of them, so there's only, you have to wait a certain amount of time to cover the entire earth. If you could launch 500 small satellites, then they could completely, you know, their tracks would be one every minute. So you might literally be able to have on-demand pictures of the ground whenever you want them. Yeah, and that's what a number of commercial interests are looking at in the visible, but the scientists are interested in that sort of thing as well. So you're saying the next generation, to put it that way, are these smaller satellites going to be in the, what, the thousands or tens of thousands? Yes. There's a crazy number proposed right now. There's not a lot of solutions being done as to how you're going to get them all down again. But that's something we're going to have to work on. There isn't a way to get them down. Well, yes. Here's what happens. With the smaller satellites, you don't launch them as high. Now that gives you the advantage that you can see more of the ground at a finer resolution. Yeah. But it means they have limited lifetimes because there's a bit of atmosphere left at that altitude. And they'll deteriorate. And they'll deteriorate and then burn up when they re-enter. That's a good solution. That gives you a burning sunset, as it were. And there are a host of new technologies they're working on. There's something that's interestingly called a balloot. It's like a balloon parachute. In space you can't just make a parachute because it won't stay up. But if you inflate it, so it's like a balloon shaped in a parachute, you suddenly have a dramatically increased air resistance. So like the space station which has to be lofted back up every few days because it's constantly sinking due to its panels. You could deploy one of these things and then all of a sudden your small satellite looks like a big satellite and it comes down way faster. You know the thing is you pump all these things up there and they're going to be up there for a while. And you know in air traffic we have the FAA. I mean the guys with the radar and they're watching all the lips on the screens. I mean how do we track all these thousands of tens of thousands? You don't want one to hit the other and all that, right? There's actually a whole wing of the military that's responsible for tracking everything down to the size of a tennis ball I think. Is that right? And whenever you launch a satellite, the first thing you wait for them for is for them to pick it up and say well here's your orbital elements. You don't have to tell them, they know. Oh they know, they're watching. They actually have these radars. But the large numbers may overwhelm even that. Their systems, the trouble with most of the things in the existing space industry is they take a while to change. In the life in general, I guess that's true. High technology still takes a while to change. And the thing about this small satellite revolution is it's kind of catching people off guard because it's going off a completely different track and by leaps and bounds and the existing infrastructure is going, whoa, wait. What's happening? It's going to be an interesting time. Well, you'll be a beneficiary, won't you? You'll have pictures closer and at higher resolution. You have more data and you can draw maps along the lines I was talking about which measure the dynamic difference between one month and next month, one year the next year. Yeah, and you can start monitoring all sorts of agricultural things. It's going to be really important for climate change because we're going to see that what we were used to is not happening anymore and we need to be able to identify it. Things are changing. You know, is this field drying out more than normal? Yeah. Let's take a look at that last photo. What's this now? So I don't know if I mentioned already but you can see industrial activity and this is perhaps an area that's near and dear to our hearts. It's where all our oil comes from. This is actually Iraq and Kuwait and that string of that sort of arc of spots are oil wells. You can see they've obviously got some sort of a deposit that has large and geographical extent and they just hold down to it and pull the oil out. And in most of the oil industry, almost anytime you pull oil out of the ground, there's going to be other things mixed in like methane gas. And that's hot. And they typically, well they typically burn it. And so there are actual oil flares and if you zoom in on Google Earth to these areas, sometimes you can see those flares just spreading out. Yeah, if you go to Google Earth or Google, you know, see the flares with the wells. If you were to zoom in closer to these areas, you don't see it so much here because my green spots are covering it over. The ones at the very top, you can see there's a little black next to it. That's also what you usually see is it just, there's just scorched earth around the, you know, around the flared area. This suggests that you could identify oil activity wherever it's happening. Right. And for that, for that matter, the intensity of it. Yes, yes. As a matter of fact, partway through our observations, I saw that they'd clearly open up an oil well off like Nova Scotia because all of a sudden a flare appeared in the middle of the ocean and you're not. You can't zoom in on Google Earth there as well because they don't tend to show us things in the ocean. They're trying to save space. So let me ask you my last question, but it's just about out of time. Why do I care what you're doing? Well, I do believe that we can come up with some, okay, let's put it this way. When we started there were a few limited uses, but over time, more and more uses are being discovered. And so the stuff I'm doing might not benefit you directly, but there are a lot of ancillary things. There is a lot of agricultural information now coming out, both in terms of what's in the soil, like moisture contents, how well the plants are doing. One of the growing areas in use for Landsat data is apparently farmers. And ironically, I've been told farmers in other countries like Europe and Australia, using the imagery to know that they need to fertilize a little bit more over in this field and they need to water a bit more because these plants are looking stressed, or we're seeing some sort of an infestation coming in, because you can kind of see it progressing. And that's important too, the timeliness, because that tells you, oh, I don't need to worry too much about it, or I really need to start worrying about this because it's moving fast. And I think that we will come with more enhanced sorts of solutions in the future, even if it's stuff we deploy to UAVs, and there's that bit of a feedback. Once you learn the kinds of things you can look for, and as the instruments are made smaller and smaller, they can put them in UAVs, for instance, and they could be the ones that are supposed to be flying over the forest fire, actually flown by the firefighters, revealing hotspots, revealing, perhaps, places that might burn up more because you can get an idea of, say, that they're especially dry or something like that. So the sensors may come and go, may change, will change, but the real benefit here is the interpretation of the data you get down from them. Right. Eric Pilger, systems engineer at HIGP, doing electronic instrumentation, and it is for everybody, and a hot time on the old planet every day. Thanks so much. Thank you.