NASA's HyspIRI Mission: Seeing the forest and the trees

Temperature information was collected simultaneously by the MASTER instrument. 

Red areas are composed of minerals with high silica, such as urban areas, while darker and cooler areas are composed of water and heavy vegetation. 

Credit: NASA

To Robert Green, light contains more than meets the eye: It contains fingerprints of materials that can be detected by sensors that capture the unique set of reflected wavelengths.

Scientists have used the technique, called imaging spectroscopy, to learn about water on the moon, minerals on Mars and the composition of exoplanets.

Green's favorite place to apply the technique, however, is right here on the chemically rich Earth, which is just what he and colleagues achieved this spring during NASA's Hyperspectral Infrared Imager (HyspIRI) airborne campaign.

"We have ideas about what makes up Earth's ecosystems and how they function," said Green, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and principal investigator of the campaign's Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) instrument.

"But a comprehensive understanding requires us to directly measure these things and how they change over landscapes and from season to season."

Toward that goal, scientists and engineers ultimately plan to launch the HyspIRI satellite—a mission recommended by the 2007 National Academy of Sciences Decadal Survey—to determine the spectral and thermal characteristics of the world's ecosystems, which are sensitive to changes in vegetation health, as well as detecting and understanding changes in other surface phenomena including volcanoes, wildfires and droughts.

Prior to flying the sensors in space, however, preparatory science investigations are underway using similar sensor technology installed on NASA's ER-2, a high-altitude aircraft based at NASA's Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility in Palmdale, Calif.

The first season of the HyspIRI airborne campaign concludes on April 25 after about a month of flights that spanned the state. Additional sets of California flights are planned for this summer and then this fall.

"We are collecting data over six zones across very diverse regions of California, from the coast to high-elevation terrain, from alpine areas to deserts to coastal ecosystems, and from agricultural to urban landscapes," Green said.

For example, the campaign's first test flight on March 29 collected data along a series of parallel flight lines.

The resulting image covers about six miles in width and almost 100 miles in length. One flight happened to pass over the San Andreas Fault. Inclusion of the fault in the flight plan was incidental, but it was a "spectacular" flight nonetheless, Green said.

The retired Space Shuttle Endeavour Last Controversial Voyage - Video

Los Angeles to Remove 400 Trees for Space... The retired Space Shuttle Endeavour is gearing up for its final trip to Los Angeles’ California Science Center. Much like Explorer, which made a long, slow trek through Houston streets with all the street lights removed to make room for its passage before being immediately replaced behind it, Endeavour is facing a challenging drive from the Los Angeles airport to its destination. The shuttle is approximately five stories tall, precluding it from passing under overpasses – thereby eliminating a highway route. The plan is to take Endeavour down a scenic route of residential streets. The only problem: many of those streets are tree-lined. The region is in the process of cutting down 400 trees to make room for the shuttle’s passage. While officials have embraced the opportunity to host Endeavour and are planning to plant twice as many saplings to make up for the downed trees, some residents are not at all happy with the plan. “It’s unacceptable to cut down oxygen-giving species just to let something pass by,” Johnnie Raines, a board member of the west area neighbourhood council, reported. “I would love to see the shuttle housed here but I don’t think we should lose trees that are 40, 60 years old.” The California Science Center reports that its foundation has donated more than $1.5 million for greening improvements in the affected areas and routes were chosen to correspond with areas that were already looking to remove trees of invasive species or incompatible with traffic and air quality plans. Endeavour is scheduled to parade through southern Los Angeles on October 12-13, its 24m wingspan sweeping through treeless streets on its final 19 km voyage.

Amborella: The First Genus of Flowers 130 Million Years ago

Amborella is a genus of rare understory shrubs or small trees endemic to the island of New Caledonia.

The genus consists of only a single species, Amborella trichopoda, and is the only member of the family Amborellaceae.

Wood of Amborella lacks the vessels characteristic of most flowering plants.

It is of great interest to plant systematists because molecular phylogenetic analyses consistently place it at or near the base of the flowering plant lineage.

That is, it represents a line of flowering plants that diverged very early on (about 130 million years ago) from all the other extant species of flowering plants.

Comparing characteristics of this basal angiosperm, other flowering plants and fossils may provide clues about how flowers first appeared—what Darwin called the "abominable mystery".

The Oldest trees on the Earth - At risk from Climate Change

The Oldest Trees on the Planet Wired Science - Click here for more images

Trees are some of the longest-lived organisms on the planet. At least 50 trees have been around for more than a millenium, but there may be countless other ancient trees that haven’t been discovered yet.

Trees can live such a long time for several reasons. One secret to their longevity is their compartmentalized vascular system, which allows parts of the tree to die while other portions thrive. Many create defensive compounds to fight off deadly bacteria or parasites.

And some of the oldest trees on earth, the great bristlecone pines, don’t seem to age like we do. At 3,000-plus years, these trees continue to grow just as vigorously as their 100-year-old counterparts. Unlike animals, these pines don’t rack up genetic mutations in their cells as the years go by.

Some trees defy time by sending out clones, or genetically identical shoots, so that one trunk’s demise doesn’t spell the end for the organism. The giant colonies can have thousands of individual trunks, but share the same network of roots.

This gallery contains images of some of the oldest, most venerable and impressive trees on earth.

Pando
While Pando isn’t technically the oldest individual tree, this clonal colony of Quaking Aspen in Utah is truly ancient. The 105-acre colony is made of genetically identical trees, called stems, connected by a single root system.

The “trembling giant” got its start at least 80,000 years ago, when all of our human ancestors were still living in Africa. But some estimate the woodland could be as old as 1 million years, which would mean Pando predates the earliest Homo sapiens by 800,000 years. At 6,615 tons, Pando is also the heaviest living organism on earth.

The photo above of the Pando colony was taken by Rachel Sussman, as part of The Oldest Living Things In The World project.

Image: “Clonal Quaking Aspens #0906-4318 (80,000 years old, Fish Lake, UT)” / Rachel Sussman

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Slow Death to Chocolate?

Yes! Yes! Yes!

IT'S chocolate egg season again, and sales of the pagan and Christian symbols of rebirth are as strong as ever. But the hunt for Easter eggs may truly be on next year, because chocolate trees are in increasing trouble.

Chocolate is made from the fermented, roasted seeds of the cacao tree. The cacao swollen shoot virus (CSSV) can kill the trees, and threatens to slash this year's spring crop by a third in the world's biggest producer, Ivory Coast. Meanwhile a fungus called witches' broom is doing the same in Brazil. Now researchers are racing to sequence the cacao genome and find genes that can resist CSSV.

Cacao trees are native to the Amazon rainforest, but west Africa produces 70 per cent of the world's cocoa, virtually all on tiny, impoverished farms. In recent years, demand for chocolate has mushroomed. The farmers cannot afford expensive fertiliser so they boost production by planting more cacao trees over a greater area. That means cutting down other trees that normally grow between cacao crops, which also replicate their rainforest origins and give them the protective shade they prefer.

"Increasingly cacao is grown almost as a monoculture," says Paul Hadley of the University of Reading, UK. That promotes the spread of disease, as does the trend towards growing the trees in drier regions - water-stressed cacao trees are less able to fight off disease.

Climate Change - Geoengineering