AgCam’s images are on the waiting list

It was a seven-year wait before UND’s AgCam was launched into space. It will be a little longer, maybe late summer, before its first high-resolution images are seen. AgCam sits aboard the International Space Station orbiting from 2,200 to 2,600 miles above Earth. The original plan was to have it unpacked and mounted by late March. Next week’s scheduled launch of the Discovery Space Shuttle is pushing every project back at least a month on the ISS schedule. Once operational, UND students will command AgCam from Room 270 in Clifford Hall. Its data will be used by farmers, ranchers and natural resource scientists to make decisions concerning land and crop management. For its first year, Olsen said AgCam’s images will come from the Great Plains, but its lens could open wider to worldwide interest. “Once we see it works, if we can get the support and staffing, we can go 24/7 anywhere,” Olsen said. “It’s just a matter of funding.”...Grand Forks Herald

This info is from NASA's website:

Brief Summary The Agricultural Camera (AgCam) will take frequent images, in visible and infrared light, of vegetated areas on the Earth, principally of growing crops, rangeland, grasslands, forests, and wetlands in the northern Great Plains and Rocky Mountain regions of the United States. Images will be delivered within 2 days directly to requesting farmers, ranchers, foresters, natural resource managers and tribal officials to help improve their environmental stewardship of the land for which they are responsible. Images will also be shared with educators for classroom use. The Agricultural Camera was built and will be operated primarily by students and faculty at the University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, ND.

Description...Current Earth remote sensor platforms typically collect data too infrequently for rapidly changing short-season northern crops that often are under cloud cover, or deliver data with too much latency for effective in-season decision support; those that can meet the preceding needs have spatial resolutions that are too coarse for evaluation of in-field variability. AgCam will allow selection of specific geographical areas of interest and request collection of AgCam imagery in both red and near-infrared bandpasses, and at medium-high spatial resolution. The AgCam sensor will be able to point up to 30 degrees off-nadir, enabling frequent (multi-week to multi-day) imaging of a requested area, dramatically improving chances of obtaining cloud-free images. Collected images will be downlinked, processed on the ground, and delivered to the requesting end users within 1-2 days of image collection. Farmers using variable-rate application and other precision agriculture techniques will be able to dynamically delineate management zones as the crop vegetation canopy changes during the growing season; this can result in more effective use of fertilizer and other chemical inputs and reduce negative environmental effects. Further, crop canopy reflectance in AgCam spectral bands is correlative to nitrogen concentrations in the plant biomass; knowledge of variability of plant nitrogen across fields can be used to improve in-season nitrogen application decisions. Ranchers will be better able to determine livestock carrying capacity of rangelands; this can help avoid ecosystem damage due to overgrazing and erosion. Rapid delivery of imagery for these and other applications will enable management decisions to be applied to the current season's operations...Italics are mine

How long will it be before the FS & BLM contract with NASA to count cows and set carrying capacity? They'll be laying off all them danged old range cons. County Assessors and other tax collectors will sign up. Did you get that horse inspected the last time you crossed a district line? The brand board will sign up. Is your premises registered with USDA? No need, they'll sign up.

Urban folks raise hell about red-light cameras but that's nothing compared to this. Hell, cowboys will have to go to town to feel "free." Ain't that a switch.