![]() ![]() The materials-except for helium-can be created relatively cheaply (about $150USD upfront) and reused. The engineering of a balloon mapping rig is very simple and intuitive. “Grassroots mapping attempts to invert this dynamic by using maps as a mode of communication and as evidence for an alternative, community-owned definition of a territory.” Required Materials Balloon mapping has already been used to document effects of the 2011 Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, the size of Occupy Wall Street protests, and to contest official maps in Lima, Peru that left residents of informal settlements of the official city map.Īccording to the Public Laboratory, mapping can be used by those in power to control territorial narratives. A tethered balloon on the other hand is able to fly at much lower altitude and collects images at around 3 centimeters spatial resolution (3cm in real space equals one pixel) as opposed to a 50cm average in Google Earth and 250m in LANDSAT satellite imagery.īalloon and kite mapping is an appropriate tool when you need high resolution, time sensitive imagery from a potentially contentious location. For breaking news stories like a natural disaster or a protest, obtaining recent or near real-time satellite imagery is critical and expensive. ![]() ![]() However, satellite imagery made available through companies like Google or Bing Maps are typically one to three years old and often feature winter images to minimize visible area covered by trees. In most cases, freely available aerial imagery is the best choice for a journalist illustrating a story with a picture from the sky. This tutorial, made with assistance from the Public Laboratory, will take you through a process of building and deploying a do-it-yourself satellite. While the idea of floating something in the sky is indeed simple, high level applications include Google’s Project Loon - focused on delivering long-range Wi-Fi via balloon and long-term surveillance missions run by the US military.īalloon mapping provides individuals or groups with a low-cost means to create a running record of events in map form, one that is temporally accurate and easy to share. The concept of balloon mapping is pretty simple, attach a camera to something that flies and take pictures of the ground. Climate scientists have long attached weather sensors called radiosonde to obtain measurements from various altitudes. But in the days before such inventions, balloons and kites we’re a handy way to obtain a view from the sky. Today, aerial imagery-pictures that are taken from above the Earth’s surface-are typically made by satellites and planes. ![]()
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