Kathleen: Welcome to Snacktime with NASA![barking] [laughs]
Okay… Welcome to Snacktime with NASA! I’m your host, Kathleen
Gaeta, and this is my dog Buoy, and we both really love cheese.
So this past year at home, I think we’ve all learned to appreciate the little things in life, and again,
one of those things for us is a nice, big cheese board. So today,
I’m gonna show you how I like to prepare my own, and where NASA actually fits
on the board. Many people don’t know that NASA has a lot to do with the food
on your plate, so we’re gonna highlight some of the foods NASA helps grow,
using data from space. Now, when you think of NASA and dairy, especially
you might think of freeze-dried ice cream for astronauts, but
the connection actually goes a lot deeper. So, why a cracker and cheese board?
When we’re talking about food, it all comes down to water.
Corn, soy, alfalfa, it all needs water too grow,
whether it’s being fed to humans or dairy cows. So when farmers
are better prepared for a water shortage in advance, they can make more sustainable
decisions, like what crops to grow, how to irrigate them,
and where and what to feed their livestock. So here to help explain the connection between
space and plate is Matt Rodell, NASA hydrospheric scientist.
Hey Matt, how’s it going?
Matt: Hey Kathleen, how are you? Thanks for having me. Kathleen: Good, thanks for being here. So while I attempt to cube some cheese, can you tell
me what NASA has to do with irrigation for agriculture?
Matt: Absolutely. So, agriculture requires a nice, wet
soil for growing crops. In order to know how well the crops
are gonna grow, the farmers need to have a better idea of how much water there is in
the soil, and so we’ve been coming up with better ways for monitoring
soil wetness from space. One of the ways we do this is
we use a NASA satellite called SMAP, which is an acronym,
and SMAP actually measures the wetness in the top of the soil
worldwide, every day. And this information is vital
for understanding how much water is available for the plants, how much water is
needed for irrigating the crops, and so it’s useful for farmers
and land managers and others. It’s also useful for monitoring
drought. Another mission that NASA has is called GRACE,
which is another acronym, and GRACE is really incredible, because it
uses measurements of Earth’s gravity field to understand
the amount of water on and in the land surface.
So we can even measure things like the amount of water in the
underground aquifers, deep underground. This is vitally important,
because groundwater is one of the main sources of water for agriculture.
It’s also a source of water for people who have wells in their backyard, like I do,
so when I turn the faucet on, that’s groundwater coming out. And in fact,
about half the produce that we eat we have groundwater
to thank for that. Because it’s used for that much irrigation. This includes things like
the wheat in your crackers, soy, fruits and vegetables
on your platter, etc. So all these things
NASA’s doing are really contributing to our understanding of the water
availability that’s critical for irrigating all these crops.
Kathleen: Interesting…and a good reminder that this cheese board needs dressing up. So I have
edamame in front of me, and what I believe to be the most underrated part of a cheese board,
which are carrots and olives.
Matt: Yeah, those are pretty water-intensive crops, and they’re grown in the Central Valley,
which is some place where proper water management is really critical.
I see you have some grapes there, too. Speaking of grapes, NASA has an ongoing
project with the US Department of Agriculture and vintners
in California called GRAPEX, where we’re using data from Landsat
satellite, along with multiple other space and ground-
based observation sources, and advanced computer models, to help
to schedule irrigation for these vineyards, and therefore, preserve
the precious resource: water. It’s really precious in California,
where there’s an ongoing drought right now, as well as most of the American West.
We use data from multiple satellites
to monitor drought. This helps the end-users like the farmers and the ranchers
and others that are interested in agriculture to better
prepare for drought, and to better plan how to mitigate
the effects of drought. Drought’s gonna become even more important in the future
we believe, with climate change. It’s likely that in some parts of the world,
droughts are going to become more frequent and more intense,
and it’s possible that the dry parts of the world will get drier,
wet parts of the world will get wetter. That’s where NASA comes in. So we’re helping with
not only the current monitoring drought, but the forecasting
of near-current drought, and then predictions
of how climate is gonna change in the future, and how it’s going to affect our water resources.
Kathleen: Well, Matt, it looks like my cheese board’s done. What do you think?
Matt: I think it looks delicious, and I can’t wait to go start my own lunch.
Thanks so much for having me, Kathleen! Kathleen: Thank you for joining me! And thank you everyone for watching;
I hope you learned a lot, I know I did. And I hope this episode
wasn’t too cheesy for you.
[laughs]Okay...
Good?