BOZEMAN, Mont. - NASA Stennis Space Center and Yellowstone Ecosystem Studies (Y.E.S.) of Bozeman have just signed an agreement to jointly evaluate two new remote sensing instruments developed by NASA. NASA plans to fly both instruments over Y.E.S. research sites in Yellowstone National Park this summer. Project results are expected to provide insight into key ecological processes in the Park.

Stennis's Commercial Remote Sensing Program is coordinating NASA's participation in this project, which also involves NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Researchers from Y.E.S., NASA, and Montana State University will compare imagery from the new sensors with other recent remote sensing data sets of Yellowstone Park and extensive field data gathered by researchers from the three organizations. MSU TechLink, a NASA-funded center at Montana State University, played a key role in establishing this project.

Both NASA and Y.E.S. are interested in seeing how well these new sensors can be used for various types of ecological applications, including stream and forest analysis. The new technology will help Y.E.S. researchers answer questions pertaining to streams, wildlife habitat, and forest health.

Projects of this type are essential to NASA in its design of new major satellite remote sensing systems such as Landsat. Both sensors are currently mounted on airplanes. According to Bob Crabtree, Research Director at Y.E.S., "Through this project, we're getting to use the sensors of tomorrow to study some of today's key ecological issues."

Y.E.S. already has a major ongoing project with NASA Stennis's Earth Observation Commercial Applications Program to evaluate the use of hyperspectral imagery for stream analysis. This new project will assess how well data from the new sensors can be used in conjunction with hyperspectral data. One of the new sensors is a radar instrument called AirSAR, developed at JPL. Radar has high potential for landcover mapping in parts of the world that are often obscured by clouds, as cloud cover is transparent to radar. The other new sensor is a Stennis scanning device called ATLAS, which has 15 channels operating in the visible through the thermal infrared wavelengths.

Y.E.S. is acquiring at least six other remote sensing data sets of the Park-including data from high resolution multispectral, hyperspectral, and radar sensors. This, along with extensive long-term field data, will eventually make Yellowstone Park one of the best-characterized ecological study sites in the world.