(upbeat music)
- We're using radar
to try to characterize oil within an oil slick.
What we wanna do is to tell where's the thickest oil.
Because most of the oil is in that thick layer.
And that's the part that they can take remediation equipment
and get rid of the most harmful oil in the environment.
(upbeat music)
(plane roars)
The radar called the UAVSAR hangs in a pod
below that aircraft.
- They want you to try it one more time.
- I fly with the aircraft and the radar
and look at the images as they're being collected.
And the aircraft flies this path
and the radar collects an image swath
that's about maybe 12 miles wide.
(upbeat music)
- Okay ready? Here we go.
(drone buzzing)
- We have a drone that makes multi-spectral measurements
from which we can derive thickness.
We have a sampler, that you put in the water
that can measure oil thickness.
And Cathleen is flying on the UAVSAR.
- We have multiple layers of going up to verify our data
and then translate it to space born systems.
(upbeat music)
- Okay, so right now we are flying a survey mission
with a multi-spectral sensor.
So we are going to generate a map of this oil.
Very thick, actionable oil.
So we're gonna collect some samples in a moment.
(drone buzzing)
- Now we're getting ready to take the tube sample,
which is a direct measurement of the thickness of the oil.
Thicker oil is what lasts the longest in the environment
and does the most damage to marine life
and the physical environment.
And that's the oil that the responders
focus on in their cleanup.
(boat motor rumbling)
- The more we know about situations, the better.
And having a ship right by Santa Barbara,
kind of made it easy and natural that the Blackfin
would get to be involved in this kind of mission.
And it's just a great partnership
between the Coast Guard and NOAA.
We hope it continues to grow
and we're excited to be a part of that.
- UAVSAR is a prototype
for an upcoming NASA mission called NISAR.
And so the methods that we develop here,
we can try to apply them to the data
that we get from that instrument.
One of the things that makes us this whole thing possible
and makes it impactful is that NOAA
is so heavily involved in this.
They're actually leading this.
And the end game is to develop a way for NOAA
to use this kind of remote sensing
and automatically tell where the thicker oil is,
not just detect that they have a slick,
but that it's the thick part of the slick.
NASA partnering with NOAA,
we can transfer this information
to people who use it practically.
(upbeat music)