FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

An International Squad of Emergency Satellites Is Tracking Ebola

Because Big Brother hates pandemics, too.
Seasonal vegetation profiles in West Africa. Image: NASA EOS

We've already thrown a lot at the Ebola crisis. Doctors Without Borders has sent 700 healthcare providers to West Africa. The United States Army has deployed 1400 soldiers to the region. All said, the international Ebola response is likely to cost over $32 billion.

And now, we're turning to NASA.

Last month, the International Charter for Space and Major Disasters sprung into action, and began to provide satellite data for the World Health Organization's Ebola response. The hope is that an eye in the sky might help healthcare workers on the ground to map out their response, and decide where to focus their energies.

Advertisement

"The whole purpose of the Charter is to get nations—like the European Union, the United States, China, who have remote-sensing instruments—to provide data to other countries that don't have those assets," said William Stefanov, a geologist and remote-sensing expert at NASA's Johnson Space Center.

The Charter itself has been around since 2000, and has responded to over 400 disasters in 110 countries. Data can come from any nation with satellites in orbit, and the Charter has proven especially useful for assessing damages and coordinating responses to natural disasters like landslides and hurricanes. But this is the first time that the Charter has taken a stab at stopping a major disease outbreak.

There's a reason for that.

"It's very difficult to actually detect Ebola from orbit," Stefanov says. "We don't even have the ability to detect an individual person's health from orbit."

Nonetheless NASA is pitching in, on the chance that something might come of the satellite data, which includes high quality maps and other geospatial imagery that could prove useful on the ground.

Under the Charter, NASA and their partners at the US Geological Survey are only encouraged to capture the data and pass it along. The tricky business of analysis and application is left to the WHO and the countries in need.

One morbid application is that, as West African farmers die en masse from the epidemic, satellites may pick up on the barren land left behind. "Unfortunately, if enough people die, fields aren't being tended to, infrastructure starts to break down, water systems fail and you start seeing visible effects," Stefanov said.

Other than that, Stefanov says that he cannot see any direct, immediate application to looking at Ebola from low-Earth orbit. Still, he is optimistic that aid workers on the ground may squeeze some information out of the satellite data.

"There's any number of very clever people out there," Stefanov said. "It's entirely possible that something useful might be extracted from the data."