On October 5-6, 2019, the #NoosphereEngineeringSchool Space Research Institute of the NAS of Ukraine and the State Academy of Science of Ukraine hosted a 2-day workshop on satellite analysis of the Earth’s environmental situation for students.
The educational events were part of a week of EU programming and Meet and Code initiative implemented by GURT Resource Center: a portal for socially active citizens in collaboration with TechSoup Europe and Haus des Stiftens gGmbH for SAP funding, and took place during World Space Week.
This workshop is dedicated to World Space Week and based on the scientific results of the H2020 ERA-PLANET project and the Copernicus Academy study materials.
29 students aged from 12 to 18 took part in the training.
The students get acquainted with the theoretical foundations of remote sensing of the Earth, the technologies of work with satellite data, including the use of artificial intelligence, and gained the following practical skills:
- Download open satellite data provided within the Copernicus program of the European Space Agency and NASA.
- Work with geospatial data in a GIS system QGIS.
- Using Python programming language to work with satellite data.
- Using artificial intelligence to determine basic types of land cover.
- Analysis of satellite data to assess the environmental situation of the city on the example of Kiev (greening of the city, quality of water resources, density of buildings, temperature of the earth’s surface)
During the workshop, the students not only mastered the new technologies needed to work with satellite data, but also formed teams that made up their own scientific projects.
The students worked on three areas: water quality in the city, green spaces in the city, and analysis of the city’s construction based on open data from the Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-3 satellites of Copernicus.
In the first area, students learned how to identify polluted water bodies, identify areas with the dirtiest and cleanest water.
In the second area, students were able to analyze the effectiveness of Kyiv’s landscaping program from 2016-2019 and to rank the greenest areas of the city.
The third direction gives ability to examined how varied density of buildings in the city, which grows Kyiv and found a relationship between density and temperature of the earth’s surface.
The workshop ended with presentations of research results conducted by teams of students and solemn awarding certificates and prizes.
As a result of the training, the participants showed great interest in exploring the planet based on satellite data and a desire to participate in similar educational initiatives in the future.
Our main mission, as the organizers of this event – to bring the younger generation to science and spark their interest in earth exploration, has been successfully fulfilled!
Also, we are pleased to announce that our event was awarded a special prize within the space week on October 12, 2019 in Zhytomyr. The award was presented by astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper during her visit to Ukraine.
We are proud that we were able to join this rating educational initiative, which coincided with World Space Week this year and was recognized at a high level.