UM Sea Secrets Lectures 2022

Sea Secrets 2022 with Ved Chirayath, Ph.D

Ved Chirayath, Ph.D, Director of Aircraft Center for Earth Studies (ACES) and G. Unger Vetlesen Chair of Earth Studies, Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science

Revealing the Ocean Deep: Next Generation Sensing Technologies for Marine and Planetary Science

We have mapped more of the surface of the Moon and Mars than our own ocean floor—but that is changing. Professor Chirayath will present three remote sensing technologies he invented while at NASA. FluidCam is an instrument that can be used from satellites and aerial drones to map shallow marine environments, such as coral reefs, at unprecedented resolution in 3D. MiDAR is a multispectral instrument used to sense living creatures and nonliving structures in light-limited environments. NeMO-Net is a machine-learning video game that teaches citizen scientists to classify coral reefs using real data from FluidCam & MiDAR. Together, these technologies will help us better understand Earth’s marine environments while furthering the search for life on other planets. Ved Chirayath is a former NASA scientist. As a teenager, he discovered a planet and moved to Russia to study astrophysics. He earned a Bachelor’s in Physics and a Master’s and Doctorate in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford University. His inventions include aircraft that fly on electric fields and instruments that map oceans. Presently, he is mapping our ocean floor, especially coral reefs and shallow marine ecosystems. Dr. Chirayath is a 2021 National Geographic Emerging Explorer and received the American Geophysical Union’s 2020 Charles S. Falkenberg Award and the NASA Early Career for “significant advances in aquatic remote sensing technology.”