Thanks to funding from the Ohio state government and the University of Toledo, Sinclair Community College and the NASA Glenn Research Center have teamed up to fly UAS over Lake Erie in Michigan. And according to Andrew Shepherd, director at the Sinclair National UAS Training and Certification Center, the goal of the partnership was, and still is, pretty simple.

“The real goal of the project was to look at how you could identify a harmful … algae bloom in Lake Erie, really, in any fresh water source,” said Shepherd via an article from My Dayton Daily News. Researchers in the area believe that the blooms are sparked by fertilizer runoff from nearby farms.

As a part of the partnership, Sinclair provides the flying services of the Altavian Inc. manufactured UAS, which are a fixed-wing Nova F7200 UAS and a Galaxy R8700 octocopter. In return, NASA Glenn provides a custom, 260-band hydro-spectral sensor package that the UAS is carry while flying above the lake. The sensor package allows the UAS to take photos of 260 pieces of the electro-magnetic spectrum at once.

“You can process it and see things you can’t see with traditional photography and videography,” said Shepherd. “It gives you signatures of what the toxic algae would look like.”

For Sinclair’s vice president of workforce development Deb Norris, this project and partnership is an achievement realized, with plenty of room for opportunities.

“We’ve been wanting to find a project to work with NASA Glenn for some time. We want to be known for applied research, and this is an excellent example of applied research.”

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