The Science and Technology Society (STS) of Sarasota-Manatee Counties, Florida is working with the NASA STELLA (Science and Technology Education for Land/Life Assessment) outreach program as a part of our STEM initiative. According to their site,
- "NASA STELLA instruments are portable low-cost do-it-yourself (DIY) instruments that support science education, and outreach through scientific engagement, inquiry, and discovery while helping you understand Landsat better".
STELLA instruments are developed under the influence and inspiration of Landsat. This alignment not only fulfills our project needs but also serves as a compelling addition to our STEAM initiatives:
-
To train the minds young Floridians to be more aware of our wetlands, to care for them and about them. Our program will bring more community publicity to the issue of wetlands change, as well.
-
To expose our middle- and high- school aged students to real science, using real data. That means how to use instrumentation and understand how the data is collected, and how the data can be used in the real world. It means not only to create beautiful charts and images that form the good results, but also to understand that data must be collected in a proper and reproducible way, that there physics reasons for lack of accuracy and lack of precision that one must understand and minimize in order to achieve meaningful results.
The NASA STELLA-Q2 is capable of making 18 different spectral measurements from the violet/blue portions of the electromagnetic spectrum out to near infrared regions (beyond our range of vision).The following figure (1) shows the visible spectrum by wavelength, and the yellow box indicates the STELLA-Q2 frequency range.
More can be found on the STELLA DIY instruments at the following link.
The following is a sample-by-sample animation of the type of data acquired from STELLA-Q2 Spectrometer built by STS. STS is providing the python code in a Jupyter Notebook that can be used as an example of how to display the data from the STELLA-Q2 device. We have also provided some sample data to be used with this notebook. It should be noted that we did change the name of some of the headers created from our instrument to add colors to each of the wavelength reading that are made in order to display each wavelength as a corresponding color. The near infrared wavelength readings are colored in grays, wheat and gold where the normal visible spectrum colors are in vivid colors that they represent.
