BGU | The Sky is No Limit

Prof. Karnieli at the Guiana Space Centre, the launch site of the Vega rocket which carried the VENμS Satellite to space. Photo: Courtesy

Prof. Arnon Karnieli, one of the founders of the Remote Sensing Laboratory at the Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research, has been analyzing satellite imagery for over 30 years.

Long-Distance Sensing

the 1970s. They provide a great deal of data about a range of different processes taking place on the Earth’s surface, in the oceans, and in the atmosphere, including those that are the result of climate change and human activity. Prof. Arnon Karnieli, one of the founders of the Remote Sensing Laboratory at the Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research in Sde Boker, has been analyzing satellite imagery for over 30 years. When he returned to Israel from his doctoral studies in the US in 1988, there were

only two observation satellites in orbit around the planet and just a handful of people were familiar with remote sensing or understood the potential information hidden in the images sent back to Earth. Karnieli built up the BGU Remote Sensing Lab from scratch and transformed it into a key partner in a slew of global research collaborations. The big breakthrough came in 1992, when BGU signed a scientific cooperation agreement with NASA. The agreement included two significant clauses: one allowed

Remote sensing provides complex sophisticated data about the Earth (and other celestial bodies) using satellites and aircraft. Thanks to humanity’s race to space, observations of the Earth from space have been consistent and continuous since

22 | English Edition | November 2023