Learn about how Janine Pollack, an Environmental Engineer, got her start at NASA and the kinds of work she does as an engineer.
Educational Resources - Search Tool
Geospatial Information Scientists and Technologists research geospatial data or develop geospatial technologies. Geospatial data is data that has a geographic component associated with it, such as coordinates or an address, and geospatial technologies are the technologies used to collect and analyze geospatial data.
An environmental planner tries to minimize the environmental impacts of housing, industrial, and transportation-related construction projects. Environmental planners help project managers navigate the environmental permitting process where they review a site to investigate potential environmental effects. This includes the effects of natural disasters.
The fires in Greece during the summer of 2007 devastated large tracks of forest and ground cover in this Mediterranean region. Students analyze these data to determine the scale, area, and percentage of the forest impacted by of these fires.
Dr. Tom Loveland is a research geographer at EROS and director of the USGS Land Cover Institute. He has been engaged in research on the use of remote sensing for land use and land cover investigations for over 25 years and has conducted studies that have spanned local to global scales. He was among the first to create continental and global-scale land cover data sets derived from remotely sensed imagery.
Carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is affected by many processes including fires, deforestation, and plant respiration. Students will evaluate a Landsat image to determine the rate of carbon dioxide sequestration in a particular area.
Students review a video that models the global impact of smoke from fires to develop an understanding of how models can be used to interpret and forecast phenomena in the Earth System.
Mechanical engineers design, develop, build, and test mechanical and thermal sensors and devices including tools, engines, and machines. These are essential systems in platforms in NASA's Earth Science missions, like satellite and airborne missions. Mechanical engineers work mostly in engineering services, research and development, and manufacturing.
Data scientists work with data captured by scientific instruments or generated by a simulator, as well as data that is processed by software and stored in computer systems. They work with scientists to analyze databases and files using data management techniques and statistics. From changes in sea level, atmospheric composition, or land use, data scientists help make sense of the petabytes of data that NASA collects and stores.
A Data Support Specialist works with the user community to understand their science needs with the goal of providing support for NASA data and information services. They represent the user in product development and development resources to assist with the user community's needs. This person works directly with users to solve problems using NASA data, or to provide resources to improve understanding of the data.