+ View all Success Stories

[Links followed by * open new browser windows.]

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center racks up a three-peat with the announcement that its Sensor Web 2.0 won an R&D 100 Award for 2008. This marks the third consecutive year that Goddard technology has been lauded at the ceremony that the Chicago Tribune dubbed the “Oscars of Invention.” Each year, R&D Magazine selects 100 of the most innovative technologies that have the potential to further scientific discovery and greatly affect human life and the way we live.

Goddard’s Sensor Web 2.0 has already shown its capability in a recent wildfire management campaign in California. Particularly user friendly and cost effective, Sensor Web 2.0 frees up highly skilled programmers and engineers to attend to more technically demanding tasks, resulting in a more efficient allocation of resources.

About the Technology

A Web services–based software, Sensor Web 2.0 gathers and assimilates data from a network of sensors – seismic and GPS ground sensors, firetower sensors, weather radar devices, and satellite sensors – enabling them to operate as a cohesive whole. By employing Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) workflows and taking advantage of emerging “mashup” capabilities, Sensor Web 2.0 enables users to set up such sensor webs through easy point-and-click interfaces. Because the sensor-integration path is not tied to a particular system, it strengthens the U.S. contribution to GEOSS, the Global Earth Observing System of Systems that stems from about 60 countries to form a network of Earth-observing systems. The result is a complete, real-time picture of Earth via shared global resources.

Dan Mandl, the innovation team leader, noted that while all sensor web initiatives work toward early detection of natural disasters, the Sensor Web 2.0 has the advantages of being particularly user friendly and cost effective. “Scientists or emergency workers typically spent months or years working with a team of programmers to assemble sensors and data processing algorithms into workflows to accomplish an application,” Mandl said. “Sensor Web 2.0 enables even students to assemble customized sensor web applications in a matter of hours or minutes, with no staff. Like the Internet, the usability will increase exponentially as the library of available workflows grows.”

Demonstrated Benefits

Goddard researchers have been testing Sensor Web 2.0 with the wildfire-fighting effort in Southern California. NASA’s EO-1 satellite captured a distant image of fire and then used the Sensor Web 2.0 architecture to autonomously trigger an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to image a detected hot spot. Conversely, the UAV was able to trigger EO-1 to take a follow up image once it detected active fires. The Sensor Web 2.0 architecture also enabled “collaboration” with the Terra and Aqua satellites as well as Air Force Weather Agency satellite imagery.

The technology can be applied to all manner of natural and manmade disasters, including giving advance warning of a tsunami approaching land; precisely determining hurricane strength, location, and trajectory; and detecting oil spills soon after the spill occurs. The development of such customized new applications is accomplished via “mashups,” which involves creating a single, integrated tool by “mashing” together data from multiple sources. So Sensor Web 2.0 transforms the operations of space-based, airborne and remote ground sensors from a complicated, manpower intensive, costly effort into a user-driven mashup activity.

Everett Hinkley, the national remote sensing program manager for the USDA Forest Service, recognizes the benefit of the Sensor Web 2.0 technology for disaster mitigation and post-disaster management. “The sensor web concept is a remarkable way to share complex geospatial data from a network of sensors linked by software and the Internet to a wide audience in a user-friendly fashion,” he said. “The Forest Service has already tapped into this system during the Southern California wildfires, and we will continue to expand our use of this technology in the future.”

Sensor Web 2.0 can be used to quickly and easily make sensors accessible and controllable over the Internet. Users can select an area of interest (either geographic or event-specific) via a standard Web portal and receive notifications of events via instant message or short message service. The technology easily plugs in new sensors, which could pop up in a Google search, growing the network without additional expenditure of resources.

“We believe that Sensor Web 2.0 has the potential to be as revolutionary to Earth monitoring as Web browsers are to the Internet,” said Nona Cheeks, chief of Goddard’s Innovative Partnerships Program Office, which submitted the technology for the R&D100 award. “It is reassuring to know that R&D Magazine considers this technology as significant as we do.”

Sensor Web 2.0 inventor team leader Dan Mandl will accept the R&D 100 Award on Goddard’s behalf at the Oct. 16 ceremony in Chicago.

About the awards

The first R&D 100 Awards were given in 1963. Many entries over the years have become household names, including Polacolor film (1963), the flashcube (1965), the automated teller machine (1973), the halogen lamp (1974), the fax machine (1975), the liquid crystal display (1980), the printer (1986), the Kodak Photo CD (1991), the Nicoderm antismoking patch (1992), Taxol anticancer drug (1993), lab on a chip (1996), and HDTV (1998).

R&D Magazine’s judges select 100 winners that exemplify the best new technologies from an international pool of contestants from universities, private corporations, and government labs. Winners of the 2008 R&D 100 Awards appear in this month’s issue of R&D Magazine.

Contact:

Innovative Partnerships Program Office
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Phone: (301) 286-2691
E-mail: techtransfer@gsfc.nasa.gov

(October 13, 2008)