Principal Investigator: Dan Barstow
Affiliation: T E R C
Windows on Earth is a suite of software tools to help students, scientists and astronauts explore Earth from space. It provides an augmented reality system to manage Earth observation targets, support on-orbit photography and help scientists and the public explore the wealth of images. The Earth visualization engine creates views of Earth as seen from orbit, with realistic features, colors, topography and day/night transitions. Scientists and astronauts use a comprehensive database of targets to set priorities and support on-orbit target identification.

Principal Investigator: Ann Kapusta
Affiliation: ThinkSpace
ThinkSpace Consulting, in collaboration with Google, proposes to collect full 360-degree imagery of the internal area of the ISS. The project will use existing on-orbit resources to create this commercial product, requiring no additional hardware items to be launched.

Principal Investigator: Dr. Paul Joss
Affiliation: Visidyne, Inc.
This project seeks to improve intensity measurements, and subsequently, path predictions of strong tropical cyclones (also known as hurricanes or typhoons) through improved modeling using a measurement technique from the low Earth orbit vantage point of the ISS. Improving intensity measurements requires accurate measurements of the altitude of eyewall clouds (the clouds surrounding the eye of a storm). For tropical cyclones of interest, a camera is mounted on a selected Cupola window and programmed to capture high-resolution exposures of the storm. The resulting sequence of digitally processed images allows Visidyne to develop algorithms necessary to determine the altitude of the eyewall clouds in a storm.

Principal Investigator: Dr. Ruhul Amin
Affiliation: BioOptoSense, LLC
Use remotely sensed hyperspectral optical measurements from HICO to develop early harmful algal bloom detection, quantification, and classification algorithms. This study will focus in the Gulf of Mexico, particularly in the eastern part where toxic algal blooms, specifically dinoflagellate Karenia brevis, regularly occur.

Principal Investigator: Dr. James Goodman
Affiliation: HySpeed Computing
Use the Hyperspectral Imager for the Coastal Oceans (HICO) instrument on the ISS to develop an enterprise architecture for image processing that leverages existing investments in Earth observation data acquisition and enables the remote sensing community to more effectively transform research ideas into functional software applications.

Principal Investigator: Dr. William H. Farrand
Affiliation: Space Science Institute
Evaluate how well HICO can characterize and map minerals associated with playas. Results could mitigate public-health issues stemming from dust storm impacts, enhance agricultural efforts to counter soil salinity problems, and improve use of playas for vehicular transport.

Principal Investigator: Dr. Paul Joss
Affiliation: Visidyne, Inc.
Tropical Cyclone Intensity Measurements from the ISS (CyMISS) experiment is a CASIS payload that will demonstrate the use of the Carnot engine model of tropical cyclones (TCs) to achieve remote measurements of the intensities of the strongest TCs more accurately than existing remote-sensing methods. The key inputs to this model are the altitudes and temperatures of the cloud tops within the TC eyewall. The temperature can be derived using well established infrared imaging techniques, while the cloud altitudes are to be derived using a new method employing pseudo-stereoscopy. Our pseudo-stereoscopic method determines the altitudes of the cloud tops of a TC by precisely tracking the apparent positions of cloud features with respect to the Earth and how those positions change over time as an observer (the ISS in this case) passes over the storm.

Principal Investigator: Dr. Samuel Ting
Affiliation: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer – 02 (AMS-02) is a state-of-the-art particle physics detector constructed, tested and operated by an international team. The AMS-02 uses the unique environment of space to advance knowledge of the universe and lead to the understanding of the universe’s origin by searching for antimatter, dark matter and measuring cosmic rays.