EMILI is working with student researchers from the University of Toronto’s Aerospace Team – Space Systems Division to track crop residue cover from a low-earth orbit using a nanosatellite equipped with a hyperspectral camera.
University of Toronto student Ege Artan (Photo supplied).
As part of the FINCH (Field Imaging Nanosatellite for Crop residue Hyperspectral) mapping mission, physics student Ege Artan spends every Saturday throughout the school year researching and building a 3U CubeSat satellite. He is part of a team of student researchers working on this project. Their ultimate goal is to conduct a technology demonstration and provide a proof of concept for crop residue mapping using hyperspectral SWIR (short wave infrared) satellite remote sensing.
Crop residues decrease soil erosion, increase soil organic matter, and improve soil quality. The crop mapping analytics being collected can be used to monitor crop stress and plant health, improve crop residue retention practices, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from soil.
“We hope to develop a cost-effective way to determine the percentage of crop residue,” said Artan. “You can already do this with high-priced satellites, but they are incredibly expensive so you wouldn’t want to send them to space just for that purpose.”
Five fields on Innovation Farms are being tracked by satellite as part of student-research. (Photo credit: EMILI)
While the students conduct research and build the FINCH mission satellite in Toronto, five fields on Innovation Farms in Grosse Isle, Manitoba are being tracked by an EnMAP hyperspectral satellite mission. The data from EnMAP image tiles help the students ground truth the effectiveness of their own satellite before launching it into space.
“Innovation Farms is incredibly helpful to us in this process,” said Artan. “Access to labeled data and hyperspectral data from the farm allows us to know the crop residue abundances and test the algorithms we have developed, which gives us a lot of confidence.”
Artan was in his second year of an undergrad at University of Toronto when he heard about this project. He jumped at the chance to take part.
“As a physics student, the opportunity to take part in intense data analysis and develop this skillset is really helpful for my career.”
Working on analyzing lab data composed of green vegetation, crop residue, and soil along with performing atmospheric modelling is both fun and challenging.
The 3U CubeSat satellite being built for the FINCH mission is less expensive than other satellites available, but it has limited spatial resolution. This makes it difficult to identify pure pixels such as endmembers in images.
“The endmembers for crop residue and soil are really similar,” said Artan. “You have some differences but they’re not as straightforward as you would like them to be. And when you add signal to noise ratio, viewing zenith angle, which changes how they look as your decomposition of crop residue, the problem gets really, really hard.”
Despite the challenges, Artan is having a lot of fun and highly recommends other students take part.
“A lot of people might think, how much connection does physics and agriculture have, but physics nowadays is a lot of data analysis,” he said. “And I’m doing an insane amount of data analysis in this project.”
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