Good day here today, we are cranking through a lot of documents today. Some folks from the other field offices are starting to rotate in and we are having a great time.
The NASA Appreciation dinner last night was great. The different agencies were given plaques and Sean O'Keefe gave a great presentation thanking everyone for their hard work. The astronauts on the Space Station even had a nice "thank you" for the 1000 or so people at the dinner. Members of 4 of the seven astronaut's families were there and expressed their gratitude for everyone's hard work. It was really a great experience.
Today I finally tracked down the GIS folks working on this project and got to sit in on a presentation that showed all of the mapping technology they used for this project. They made over 30,000 maps in a 90 day period - that is very impressive. Also discussed in the presentation were some of the analysis thay have done using the ballistic coefficiencies of the debris, correllated with the radar returns from the day of the accident. They used this information to plot out search areas based on the size of the radar return or "blip". Using the mapping software, they could project the information into 3D space and view the data from any angle.
They also showed 3D bathymetry data from some of the lakes and reservoirs they searched. The water searches did not yield much debris due to the fact that when the reservoir was created 40-odd years ago, they did not remove trees, houses, they just flooded the valley. In the 3D model of one, you can see the original creek bed, a dike along the creek and several bridges, trees still standing with limbs, etc. Any debris would blend right in and could not be seen. Floating logs and schools of fish also show up in this high-resolution data. Fantastic stuff.
Well, I have a pile of stuff to do, talk at ya later.
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