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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, January 27, 2014 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

photo of Compton Tucker standing on a tumulus

Compton Tucker

"Space Technology vs. Tomb Robbers in Central Turkey"

ABSTRACT -- This talk will describe the use of NASA technology to study the ancient site of Gordion, home to the legendary King Midas. The technologies used include 50 cm resolution satellite images, ground-penetrating radar, magnetic surveys, and GPS. Gordion was inhabited from c. 1200 BC up through Roman times. The site includes an ancient city and over 100 tumuli or burial mounds, some rather large. The talk will describe interrupting tomb robbers on one large tumulus, an inspection of their efforts, including a hidden entrance, and the efforts of archaeologists to rescue scientific information from the site.

SPEAKER -- Compton Tucker specializes in studying the earth with satellite data. He was among the first researchers to employ coarse-resolution satellite data to exploit the time domain for studying global photosynthesis on land, determining land cover, monitoring droughts, providing famine early warning, and predicting ecologically-coupled disease outbreaks. He has also used large quantities of Landsat data to study temperate, subtropical, and tropical forests as well as glacier variation in the tropics and in Turkey, both from the 1970s to the present. From 2006 to 2009 he was on NASA detail to the Inter-Agency Climate Change Science Program where he was the co-chairperson of the Interagency Working Groups on Observations and Land Use and Land Cover Change. He is the author of > 175 journal articles that have been cited > 19,000 times.


Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov