NASA's Eyes in the Sky Focus on Oil Spill Cleanup

(May 13) -- Like a bird with bionic vision, a NASA research plane equipped with a high-tech camera soared over the Florida coast and the Gulf of Mexico spill today, sending back information that will help workers mop up oil gushing from the failed Deepwater Horizon rig.

NASA has also tasked a number of its satellites with getting big-picture images of the oil spill, which changes daily in shape with currents and winds. However, for a more close-up view the space agency has called upon its Earth Resources-2 plane -- a relative of the U-2 spy plane -- to fly periodic scouting missions.

Although the ER-2 flies at twice the altitude of the average jetliner, its airborne visible/infrared imagining spectrometer (AVIRIS) -- a souped-up camera that can see 224 colors -- allows it to capture immensely detailed images.

"We are detecting molecules from 65,000 feet," Michael Eastwood, an electro-optical engineer and senior NASA engineer with the AVIRIS program, told AOL News. "We can detect what is a just a thin, thin oil sheen, which is annoying but doesn't matter as much as the big, thick emulsified globs of oil."

Having such specific information means that federal agencies working on the cleanup can target where their efforts will do the most good.

Eastwood said the AVIRIS also is sending back images of the coastline – such as portions of the Florida coast photographed today -- so that when oil hits the shore, the authorities will have information about what the area looked like before.

"In the past week, we've done six months worth of work," said Eastwood, who is based at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. And no one is complaining about the long hours, he added. "Everyone is really engaged in this. It's an opportunity to do something positive and constructive in the face of such a horrific disaster."

Part of NASA's overall science efforts, the AVIRIS can monitor insect damage in California's pine trees; invasive species in Hawaiian forests; mountain snow depths, which help in predicting future water supplies; and heavy-metal concentrations at Superfund sites, so that the worst areas can be cleaned up first.

"Although NASA's primary expertise is in using remote-sensing instruments to conduct basic research on the entire Earth system, our observations can be used for societal benefit in response to natural and technological disasters like this oil spill," Michael Goodman, NASA program manager for natural disasters, said in a release.

NASA can even help in urban catastrophes: After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack on New York's twin towers, the space agency's cameras checked for asbestos in the wreckage and pointed firefighters to spots that were still burning, Eastwood said.