Answers

1. What are the main objectives of your experiment?

Our team's main purpose is to:

-make assumptions about nature’s health and see if there has been any major deforestation, by comparing with the images of the same areas from previous years. Plants reflect near-infrared light, and healthy plants reflect more than stressed plants;

-identify possible fire outbreaks;

-use the results to identify the areas most affected by chemical pollution. By using other images, taken in the previous years for the same region, we can observe how the pollution has affected plant life in time;

-identify the active volcanoes and see how the areas around them are affected;


2. Describe how you will achieve these objectives.

We will use Izzy’s INFRARED camera to map the area that the ISS covers, taking pictures and comparing them to the ones taken in the past to formulate a conclusion about the Earth’s ecosystem and establish the areas with the highest possibility of catching fire. We will use the PiCamera function to take the photos, the skyfield library to find the coordinates which correspond to the pictures and we will store these coordinates using the photos' EXIF TAGS.

We hope we can make people conscious about the health state of our planet.


3. What do you think the results of your experiment will be?

Our team’s goal is to try and make people more aware of the importance of our planet’s health state. We hope to get good pictures that we can use to analyse and record anomalies such as fire outbreaks, active volcanoes, massive deforestations etc. In case of natural disasters, chemical or other types of pollution our team will propose projects in order to reduce or remove the threat altogether. In case our images will be unclear, we will try and find the cause of it, as well as try to come up with ideas for future projects.

4. Please estimate how much storage space (in megabytes) your experimental results will use on the Astro Pi computer.

We will be taking pictures roughly each second at 640*360 quality, and one picture will take 0.1MB of storage. That means 1080MB, give or take 200MB for safety.