For this month’s edition of Mapping For Good, we’ll be taking a look at one of my all-time favorite resources for in-depth web maps and spatial information, “Mapping L.A.” from the Los Angeles Times. I’ll come clean from the start on my biases as a Southern Californian now living in Colorado and would guess that the data to be found on the site holds less appeal for those with no connection to LA. Nevertheless, as America’s second-largest city and by far the largest county in the nation (Los Angeles has roughly 9.4 million residents!), the information contained in Mapping L.A.’s many maps often hint at greater trends in the US as a whole.

Less of a project per se and more of an all-inclusive portal, Mapping L.A. began in 2009 with the publication of a LA Times’ article and this line, “a map of 87 neigh­bor­hoods in the city of Los Angeles, re­drawn with the help of read­ers who agreed or dis­agreed with [Los Angeles’] ini­tial bound­ar­ies.” The result was a total surprise from The Times, with a massive outpouring of public opinion overnight:

“But read­ers didn’t just com­ment on the bound­ar­ies; hun­dreds sent notes — short es­says, really — on the places they live. They were in­form­at­ive, hu­mor­ous, thought-pro­vok­ing and of­ten elo­quent.”

From that initial project and the many threads of conversation to follow, Mapping L.A. was born. Now expanded to the entirety of Los Angeles County and including 158 cities and unincorporated places and 114 neighborhoods within the city proper, it stands as one of, if not the most, thorough mapping portals for a major American city. There are so many questions one can answer with it that providing a generalized summary in a one page article is nearly impossible. Curious what percentage of the LA neighborhood of San Pedro was originally born in Israel? (11.3% in case you were). Want to know the exact number of veterans in Echo Park, when they served, and how it compares to the county and the nation as a whole? You can do that too. All figures are accompanied with detailed graphs and charts as well, a true data-lover’s paradise.

The project continues to grow, spurred on largely by the heavy community involvement mentioned earlier. If you live in SoCal or are just a data-freak like myself, I highly recommend you poke around the site for a bit, you will not be disappointed!

To learn more about Mapping L.A., visit the portal on the Los Angeles Times website at http://maps.latimes.com/neighborhoods/

Fletcher Berryman
Cloud Tamer
(970) 710-0909
fletcher@apollomapping.com

The Nicholas U. Mayall Telescope in Arizona is getting an upgrade that will help researchers create the most detailed 3D map of the Universe. The retrofit is for the 9-ton Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI).

Its predecessor, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), is equipped with 1,000 optical fibers. By comparison, DESI is going all in with five times more fibers. The device is comprised of 5,000 fiber-optic sensors, each one the size of a pencil. The fibers are controlled by robots that position the fibers and change the survey area in space. The instrument will stare at one point in the sky, collecting light from distant objects, for 20 minutes before changing its position.

The light captured by the fibers will then be transmitted to ten powerful spectrographs for analysis. Data crunched by the spectrographs will tell researchers how fast objects are moving by analyzing their red shift. More distant objects that are moving away from Earth appear red as the visible wavelength is stretched into the red part of the spectrum. DESI will be able to look as far back as 11 billion years. These are celestial bodies whose light is so far away that it has taken 11 billion years to reach Earth. The red shift tells researchers how fast these objects are moving and therefore the speed of the expansion of the Universe and the effects of dark energy.

Dark energy has never been directly measured, we only know that the Universe continues to expand despite the measured presence of gravity, a force that pulls objects together. We also know that the expansion of the Universe is speeding up, not slowing down. So, if gravity is bringing objects together but the net movement of the Universe as a whole is expanding outwards then there is a force at work that humans have yet to identify. Using fancy math that is over my head, scientists have calculated that roughly 68% of the Universe is comprised of dark energy.

With the help of DESI, researchers hope to unveil some of the mysteries of the Universe. The first measurements are scheduled to take place early in 2019.

As government agencies and commercial entities around the world set their sights on Mars and further destinations in space, they are looking to the Moon as a kind of base camp for space exploration.

NASA and its commercial partners envision a space station orbiting near the Moon to facilitate new discoveries. The first step is to design and manufacture the power and propulsion system element. This element is necessary to maintain and adjust the gateway’s position in lunar orbit. NASA selected five companies to come up with propulsion technology solutions. They will need to develop a system that is three-times more powerful than existing systems. They have also solicited proposals for space habitats.

While NASA has its eye on the sky, the European Space Agency (ESA) is digging deep. The ESA is considering all options for the lunar base, from a modular system to subterranean. The most appealing plan is to create a lunar base by turning lunar regolith into construction material. Instead of manufacturing a lunar base and shipping it to the Moon, which comes with numerous logistical challenges and points of failure, 3D printing robots could do the job onsite.

Turning the lunar soil into building material is attractive because it requires the least amount of resources from Earth. Excavating machines or heavy payloads would be unnecessary, saving time and money. Repairs to the structure could be completed quickly without shipping in supplies.

The preliminary design uses an inflatable structure to secure a pressurized internal environment. The lunar regolith would then be printed and placed over the inflatable. The blocks need to be 800 mm thick to protect from radiation, meteorites and thermal gradients. The side facing the sun will need 1500 mm of regolith to protect from solar flares, solar winds and galactic cosmic rays. It is easier to estimate the direction of these forces with plans to place the base at one of the poles. The poles offer better access to frozen water that can be used to create breathable air in the inflatable.

The original study used a saline solution and metal oxides as additives to bind the regolith together, an expensive solution since the additives need to be shipped from Earth. A more recent study used concentrated sun light to bind the dust particles together. The proof of concept was completed using volcanic rock to simulate the moon dust.

Whether floating in space or creating lunar hobbit holes, returning to the Moon appears to be the next stop on our journey through the solar system.

In the nearly two years we’ve published the Mapping for Good series here for our Geospatial Times newsletter, we have covered a wide variety of charitable and sometimes just down-right fun mapping projects around the world. Nearly all of them, however, have focused in way or another on how our world is shifting in the face of global change. With this trend in mind, we thought it would be refreshing to look at a mapping project that analyses worlds long since forgotten. Enter the Theban Mapping Project (TMP) of the American University in Cairo.

Since its beginning in 1978, the Theban Mapping Project has been working to prepare a comprehensive archaeological database of the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes. Thebes was a city located on the east bank of the Nile about 800 kilometers south of the Mediterranean, within the modern city of Luxor. Having served as the capital of Egypt during the Middle King and the New Kingdom eras, the city was the most venerated of all Egyptian settlements in its heyday. So why is the project still taking place 40 years later, for a city that stopped growing thousands of years ago? As it turns out, the very issues we’ve covered in our many articles on global change are even effecting the ancient ruins of cultures long since past:

‘With its thousands of tombs and temples, Thebes is one of the world’s most important archaeological zones. Sadly, however, it has not fared well over the years. Treasure-hunters and curio-seekers plundered it in the past; pollution, rising ground water, and mass-tourism threaten it in the present. Even early archaeologists destroyed valuable information in their search for museum-quality pieces.

Today, however, we realize that the monuments of Thebes are a finite resource. If we fail to protect and monitor them, they will vanish, and we and our descendants will all be the poorer. The TMP believes that the first and most essential step in preserving this heritage is a detailed map and database of every archaeological, geological, and ethnographic feature in Thebes. Only when these are available can sensible plans be made for tourism, conservation, and further study.”

With its vulnerable artifacts at the mercy of time, the Theban Mapping Project sees its efforts as more pertinent than ever. With these risks in mind, the project has shifted its focus in the last decade to the famed Valley of the Kings. Having assembled measurements of Theban tombs using modern surveying techniques, the TMP is currently preparing 3D models of the Valley’s contents. In all these efforts, the value of sharing their works’ findings is always viewed as important as the work done in the field. This sharing is accomplished through both academic and more casual publications as well as regular contributions on the group’s website.

To learn more about the Theban Mapping Project and how you can contribute, visit www.thebanmappingproject.com.

Fletcher Berryman
Cloud Tamer
(970) 710-0909
fletcher@apollomapping.com

The Cold War marked a time of unprecedented advancements in aerospace technology that the U.S. has not seen since that time. The Apollo 17 mission in 1972 was the last time a person set foot on the Moon. Buoyed by the threat of war and an insatiable need to prove our superiority against the U.S.S.R., NASA pushed the limits of current technology. Today, the space agency has diminished in importance in the eyes of Congress and the public at large.

Conversely, China has picked up the baton where the U.S. left it to rust along with deductive reasoning and evidence-driven science. The Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee recently advised the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Chinese government is jockeying with the US for dominance in key technologies that pose a serious threat to U.S. security. Not only are they advancing in space and satellite technologies but in artificial intelligence and cyber technologies.

Encryption is a key area of interest for governments and commercial industry. Barely a day goes by without hearing some new tale of hacking or weakness in security protocols. China recently developed the quantum technology to encrypt signals sent over a long distance. Unfortunately, I do not have sufficient knowledge or ability to fully understand the science behind the technology. At a basic level, data can be sent the usual way and the key needed to open that file is sent via a satellite called Micius in the form of photons. Any attempt to intercept the photon would leave signs on the photon, i.e. it would wipe away sections of the key.

The latest test of quantum keys came in the form of an encrypted videoconference between researchers in Beijing and Vienna, a distance of 4,722 miles (7,600 kilometers). Previously, Micius encrypted keys for two photos over a shorter distance. This achievement is astonishing and difficult to grasp. It very rightly should raise concerns about the ability of the United States stay competitive with China in technology, security and space exploration.

There are plans to send up more quantum satellites higher into orbit to create a global network for the distribution of quantum keys throughout China and Europe.

The Chinese continue to increase their investment in space technology and exploration, but that doesn’t come without a fair share of challenges. China launched their first space station, Tiangong-1, in September 2011 as a crewed lab and experiment for a more ambitious multiple-module space station to launch sometime in the 2020s.

In March of 2016, the Chinese released an official statement saying they lost the telemetry link with Tiangong-1. Since losing control of the space station, it has slowly spiraled towards the Earth. It’s estimated to reenter the Earth’s atmosphere sometime in mid-March 2018. Where and when are the big questions fueling added curiosity to the eventual demise of Tiangong-1.

The only information to its possible crash site is a rather vague, ‘somewhere between 43 degrees North latitude and 43 degrees South latitude’. For those of us in the Western hemisphere you’re looking at an area between Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Trelew, Argentina; and near the Prime Meridian, somewhere between Marseille, France and the ocean betwixt South Africa and Prince Edward Island. In the Eastern hemisphere the impact area extends from Bishkek, Kyrgystan and Kato, Japan to the Indian Ocean and Cygnet, Tasmania.

The longitude and date of entry is entirely unknown, but don’t let that stop you from making an educated (or uneducated) guess. The Aerospace Corporation’s Center for Orbital Reentry Debris Studies (CORDS) is taking guess from the general public on the date and time of reentry. The closest guess will win some free Aerospace swag. So give it your best shot. Your guess is as good as anyone else’s!

In other impact news, the Earth will have a close encounter of the asteroid kind on February 4^th around 1:30 p.m. PST. Asteroid 2002 AJ129 will pass som 2.6 million miles (4.2 million kilometers) from Earth, that’s about 10 times the distance between the Moon and Earth. The asteroid is classified as intermediate in size, less than a mile in length and width. While classified as a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (PHA), there is no chance of it colliding with Earth during its flyby or in the next 100 years.

On January 16, 2018, some Michigan residents witnessed a meteor explode in the atmosphere, causing a 2.0 magnitude seismic event–a pretty cool event with brief videos of the explosion worth looking at!

With our world changing every day and sadly not always for the best, it’s no surprise that we’ve found ourselves covering pollution as a topic several times here in our Mapping for Good series. Air pollution, oceanic and stream pollution, trash… you name it and there’s probably an organization doing their best to map the issue. Air pollution in particular can be a tricky one; after all, with air being a mixture of gases it’s much more difficult to map its ever-changing state over a localized area than say litter or the water quality of a given stream. How then can one go about collecting and compiling more accurate air quality data to allow policy makers and stakeholders to make more informed decisions? A collaborative partnership between the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and Google’s Google Earth Outreach is seeking to do just that.

The question they sought to answer from the start was simple: “Air pollution is dangerous to our health, but we can’t see it and it’s hard to measure. So how do we protect people from it?”

The two organizations convened and matched each other’s specialties in one cohesive effort, The Environmental Defense Fund bringing to the table decades of experience in monitoring the environment and working with policy makers, and the Google Earth and Maps team with its cartographic expertise and most importantly, the on-the-ground Google Street View car fleet. The idea’s unprecedented leap ahead of conventional measurement techniques is summarized on the project’s site:

“Conventionally, stationary air quality monitors provide most of the information we have about air quality in U.S. cities. This new mobile methodology allows us to collect much more data, and to collect it at street level, where people are actually breathing the air. While this data is not meant to be used to show compliance with air quality standards, it helps us better understand where people are at the greatest risk from unhealthy air.”

The equipped Google Street Cars were deployed to areas where there are three stationary, regulatory-grade air quality monitors.

The initiative is only a segment of a growing effort on the part of the Environmental Defense Fund to advance its monitoring programs. Implemented in Oakland, the Google and EDF team found additional support from the University of Texas, working closely with Aclima to measure and analyze pollution data collected by Google Street View cars. Additional support was found in collaboration with community leaders at the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project (WOEIP), “a community-based organization with deep experience in local air pollution issues, to identify potential causes of poor air quality. [They] highlighted traffic on the freeway, heavy-duty trucks moving through the community, and industrial activities as major sources of pollution that can impact people nearby.”

The totality of the project’s results and findings are still in analysis but further information of the data recorded as well as maps compiled with such information can be found here .­­

Fletcher Berryman
Cloud Tamer
(970) 710-0909
fletcher@apollomapping.com

It’s 2018 people, love it or hate it. There are innumerable unknowns that lie ahead of us, however, there are some known unknowns in our celestial future that we can look forward to. NASA has a packed schedule for the next year, from missions to Mars to discovering new planets.

NASA continues its exploration of Mars with the InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) mission to place a lander on the planet. InSight is equipped with sensors to study the rocky terrain. It will measure seismic activity along with internal temperature and composition. More than just a Mars lander, InSight is helping researchers better understand the formation of all terrestrial planets in our solar system. InSight is scheduled for launch in May and will arrive on Mars in November of 2018.

OSIRIS-REx is already on its way to its first destination, the asteroid Bennu. In August, OSIRIS-REx will start maneuvers to come along side Bennu and match its velocity. During the following year, OSIRIS-REx will survey the asteroid looking for satellites and plumes, as well as geological, thermal and spectral properties. It will also map Bennu in high resolution before obtaining a sample and returning to Earth.

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is launching in March of 2018, joining the Kepler mission in the search for exoplanets. The main directive is to find small planets orbiting bright stars relatively nearby. The closer the planet, the better researchers can characterize the atmosphere and composition. TESS will monitor more than 200,000 stars in its two-year mission looking for temporary drops in brightness that’s characteristic of a planet transiting a star.

Not technically launching until the spring of 2019, my personal favorite is the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The eventual replacement for the Hubble Space Telescope, Webb is equipped with a 6.5-meter primary mirror. Once operational, we’ll have a decade’s worth of new and exciting imagery.