University Teams Selected as Finalists to Envision New Aviation Responses to Natural Disasters 

Eight teams participating in the 2024 Gateways to Blue Skies: Advancing Aviation for Natural Disasters Competition have been selected to present their design concepts to a panel of industry experts at the 2024 Blue Skies Forum, May 30 and 31, 2024 at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.  

Sponsored by NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate (ARMD), this year’s Blue Skies Competition asked teams of university students to research and conceptualize aviation-related systems that will aid in natural disaster management, and to submit a five to seven-page proposal and a video summarizing their concept.  

“We are thrilled with the diversity of ideas from all the finalists and can see their passion for making a real impact in natural disaster response through new and improved aviation systems,” said Steven Holz, NASA Aeronautics University Innovation Assistant Project Manager and Blue Skies judge and co-chair. “We look forward to seeing their final papers, infographics, and hearing their final presentations at the forum.” 

The 2024 Gateways to Blue Skies: Advancing Aviation for Natural Disasters finalist projects represent diverse natural disaster response types, including earthquakes, avalanches, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, floods, and wildfires: 

Boston University  

Deployable Unmanned Aerial System to Detect and Map Volcanic Ash Clouds  

Advisor: James Geiger  

Boston University  

Rapid Evaluation, Coordination, Observation, Verification & Environmental Reporting (RECOVER)  

Advisor: Dr. Anthony Linn  

Bowie State University  

Enhancing Earthquake Disaster Relief with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning  

Advisor: Dr. Haydar Teymourlouei  

California State Polytechnic University, Pomona  

Aero-Quake Emergency Response Network  

Advisor: Mark Gonda  

Cerritos College  

F.I.R.E. (Fire Intervention Retardant Expeller)  

Advisor: Janet McLarty-Schroeder  

Columbia University  

AVATARS: Aerial Vehicles for Avalanche Terrain Assessment and Reporting Systems  

Faculty Advisor: Dr. Mike Massimino  

North Carolina State University  

Reconnaissance and Emergency Aircraft for Critical Hurricane Relief (REACHR)  

Advisor: Dr. Felix Ewere  

University of Texas, Austin  

Data Integrated UAV for Wildfire Management  

Advisor: Dr. Christian Claudel  

As climate change increasingly influences the frequency and severity of natural disasters on a global scale, opportunities to contribute at the intersection of technological advancement, aviation, and natural disasters grow in both number and importance. NASA Aeronautics is dedicated to expanding its efforts to assist commercial, industry, and government partners in advancing aviation-related systems that could help prepare for natural disasters, lessen their impacts, and speed up recovery efforts. 

The eight finalist teams each receive $8,000 stipends to facilitate full participation in the Gateways to Blue Skies Forum, which will be held in May in Mountain View and will be livestreamed globally. Winning team members earn a chance to intern at one of NASA’s Aeronautics centers in the 2024-25 academic year. 

The 2024 Gateways to Blue Skies competition is sponsored by NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate’s (ARMD’s) University Innovation Project (UI) and is managed by the National Institute of Aerospace (NIA). 

For more on the Gateways to Blues Skies: Advancing Aviation for Natural Disasters competition, visit https://blueskies.nianet.org. 

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Tech Today: Cutting the Knee Surgery Cord

After Eugene Malinskiy saw a physician assistant trip over arthroscopic camera cords during a medical procedure, he and his brother, Ilya, set out to develop a wireless arthroscopic camera.

Early in the development process, the Malinskiys got a boost from engineers at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, who advised on technical specifications through the center’s Adopt-a-City program. This agency program enabled Glenn engineers to consult with them pro bono via a Space Act Agreement with the city of Cleveland.

The team also consulted with NASA engineers on their plan to use the ultra-wideband protocol – radio technology enabling encrypted transfer of a high-definition signal – and their planned processors and chips used in the device’s central processing unit.

Ilya Malinskiy said the company gave investors the space agency engineers’ feedback. “Being able to say we had very skilled NASA engineers take a look at our device and say we should keep going was very, very useful.”

It turned out that the first wireless arthroscopic camera wasn’t entirely unlike CubeSats – tiny satellites that often orbit Earth in clusters.

“We had a lot of the same issues,” Ilya Malinskiy said. “We both have very small devices that need reliable power without adding a lot of weight.”

Ultimately, the NASA engineers connected the Lazurite team with several high-fidelity aerospace lithium-ion battery vendors.

In 2022, Lazurite’s ArthroFree Wireless Camera System became the first FDA-cleared wireless camera system for minimally invasive surgery. Since then, the device has assisted in countless surgeries, and the company has raised tens of millions of dollars.

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New NASA Software Simulates Science Missions for Observing Terrestrial Freshwater

From radar instruments smaller than a shoebox to radiometers the size of a milk carton, there are more tools available to scientists today for observing complex Earth systems than ever before. But this abundance of available sensors creates its own unique challenge: how can researchers organize these diverse instruments in the most efficient way for field campaigns and science missions?

To help researchers maximize the value of science missions, Bart Forman, an Associate Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Maryland, and a team of researchers from the Stevens Institute of Technology and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, prototyped an Observational System Simulation Experiment (OSSE) for designing science missions dedicated to monitoring terrestrial freshwater storage.

“You have different sensor types. You have radars, you have radiometers, you have lidars – each is measuring different components of the electromagnetic spectrum,” said Bart Forman, an Associate Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Maryland. “Different observations have different strengths.”

Terrestrial freshwater storage describes the integrated sum of freshwater spread across Earth’s snow, soil moisture, vegetation canopy, surface water impoundments, and groundwater. It’s a dynamic system, one that defies traditional, static systems of scientific observation.

Forman’s project builds on prior technology advancements he achieved during an earlier Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO) project, in which he developed an observation system simulation experiment for mapping terrestrial snow. 

It also relies heavily on innovations pioneered by NASA’s Land Information System (LIS) and NASA’s Trade-space Analysis Tool for Designing Constellations (TAT-C), two modeling tools that began as ESTO investments and quickly became staples within the Earth science community.

Forman’s tool incorporates these modeling programs into a new system that provides researchers with a customizable platform for planning dynamic observation missions that include a diverse collection of spaceborne data sets.

In addition, Forman’s tool also includes a “dollars-to-science” cost estimate tool that allows researchers to assess the financial risks associated with a proposed mission.

Together, all of these features provide scientists with the ability to link observations, data assimilation, uncertainty estimation, and physical models within a single, integrated framework.

“We were taking a land surface model and trying to merge it with different space-based measurements of snow, soil moisture, and groundwater to see if there was an optimal combination to give us the most bang for our scientific buck,” explained Forman.

While Forman’s tool isn’t the first information system dedicated to science mission design, it does include a number of novel features. In particular, its ability to integrate observations from spaceborne passive optical radiometers, passive microwave radiometers, and radar sources marks a significant technology advancement.

Forman explained that while these indirect observations of freshwater include valuable information for quantifying freshwater, they also each contain their own unique error characteristics that must be carefully integrated with a land surface model in order to provide estimates of geophysical variables that scientists care most about.

Forman’s software also combines LIS and TAT-C within a single software framework, extending the capabilities of both systems to create superior descriptions of global terrestrial hydrology.

Indeed, Forman stressed the importance of having a large, diverse team that features experts from across the Earth science and modeling communities.

“It’s nice to be part of a big team because these are big problems, and I don’t know the answers myself. I need to find a lot of people that know a lot more than I do and get them to sort of jump in and roll their sleeves up and help us. And they did,” said Forman.

Having created an observation system simulation experiment capable of incorporating dynamic, space-based observations into mission planning models, Forman and his team hope that future researchers will build on their work to create an even better mission modeling program.

For example, while Forman and his team focused on generating mission plans for existing sensors, an expanded version of their software could help researchers determine how they might use future sensors to gather new data.

“With the kinds of things that TAT-C can do, we can create hypothetical sensors. What if we double the swath width? If it could see twice as much space, does that give us more information? Simultaneously, we can ask questions about the impact of different error characteristics for each of these hypothetical sensors and explore the corresponding tradeoff.” said Forman.

PROJECT LEAD

Barton Forman, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

SPONSORING ORGANIZATION

NASA’s Advanced Information Systems Technology (AIST) program, a part of NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO), funded this project

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