How does NASA know what data different organizations might need for the future? Keegan Kessler ’23 is helping to identify some of that information.
Kessler was chosen to participate in the spring 2022 semester of NASA DEVELOP, a branch of NASA Applied Sciences’ Capacity Building Program. DEVELOP is a 10-week program, during which teams of undergraduate and graduate students work on projects that partner with a variety of organizations to address environmental and public policy issues through the use of NASA Earth Observations (EO) and other geospatial technologies.
Kessler first heard about DEVELOP from Colgate’s geography department — through an alumni contact.
“Typically, a NASA DEVELOP project works on a particular issue to deliver analyses or software to specific partner organizations,” Kessler says. “However, for my project, we are conducting a needs assessment to explore how disaster and environmental justice (EJ) organizations can address environmental and social issues through the use of satellite data.”
Kessler’s team is currently working on a landscape analysis through literature reviews and community outreach to identify and later interview organizations that could be potential partners with DEVELOP. The team will use GIS and NASA EO to generate examples of how remote sensing data could be used by organizations to aid their work in disaster mitigation, preparation, response, and recovery.
“At the end of the term, we will create an Esri StoryMap to illustrate our findings and provide organizations with resources, such as geospatial technology and software trainings,” Kessler says. “Our project will propose future projects for the DEVELOP program to work with these organizations, as well as provide important considerations for incorporating an EJ framework into NASA DEVELOP.”
Further information about NASA DEVELOP is described on the NASA website: https://develop.larc.