WHO/WHAT: The University of North Dakota’s (UND’s) Agricultural Camera (AgCam), designed and built by UND students and faculty from several departments and delivered to the International Space Station (ISS) last November, is scheduled to become operational Tuesday.

WHEN/WHERE: Tuesday, April 14, aboard the International Space Station; ISS astronaut Michael Barratt is scheduled to complete the assembly and activation process by 3 p.m. Central Time (see this National Aeronautics and Space Administration [NASA] site about AgCam: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/science/experiments/AgCam.html).

DETAILS:  “AgCam has been a partnership between UND and NASA that will give a boost to the reputation of our region and help farmers and ranchers across the Upper Great Plains. That should be a source of pride for our entire state,” said Sen. Byron Dorgan, who secured $16.1 million in federal funding for UND’s Upper Midwest Aerospace Consortium (UMAC), which created AgCam.

“Faculty and students from several colleges and centers on campus have produced an instrument that will analyze the composition of agricultural and other materials on the surface of the earth from the International Space Station,” said UND President Robert O. Kelley. “The consolidation of multiple technologies into a single instrument will add tremendous economic value to the agricultural industry in North Dakota and around the world. UND and NASA have forged a very productive partnership in this initiative.”

AgCam will take visible light and infrared images of crops, rangeland, grasslands, forests, and wetlands in the northern Great Plains and Rocky Mountain. It’ll be operated from the student-run Science Operations Center (SOC) on the UND campus, said AgCam project manager Doug Olsen, an electrical engineer and program director at UMAC’s Center for People and the Environment and AgCam project manager.

USEFUL LINKS: http://www.umac.org/sensors/agcam/eng.html; http://www.und.edu/agcam/dorgan.html.

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