Posted: Mar 19, 2009 1:41 PM
Updated: Mar 19, 2009 1:57 PM
KILN, Miss. - The $1.2 million expansion of the technology center at Stennis International Airport will allow a tenant to begin producing in Mississippi later this year a new generation of highly advanced lidar systems.
The expansion adds two wings to the airport's Stennis Technology Center. One will provide Optech International with the room for electro-optical laboratories to begin manufacturing lidar systems and grow from 15 to 20 or more employees.
The other wing will be used by the Joint Airborne Lidar Bathymetry Technical Center of Expertise, a federal partnership that conducts airborne coastal mapping and charting. JALBTCX will add four to six new employees to add to the current 26.
While the numbers are not particularly startling, it marks the continued growth and importance of a facility that brings together under one roof federal and corporate experts in hydrographic surveying, a field likely to grow.
Technology center
The Stennis Technology Center is used by two separate organizations that are tied together in their work: Optech International, a company with roots in Canada, and the federal government's Joint Airborne Lidar Bathymetry Technical Center, a partnership of the Army Corps of Engineers, the Naval Oceanographic Office and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Formed in 1994, JALBTCX four years later established its office at Stennis International Airport, not far from Stennis Space Center, in part because of the wealth of work done in geospatial technologies. JALBTCX supports the Corps' National Coastal Mapping Program and the Oceanographic Office's Littoral Analysis missions. It also does research and development in airborne lidar bathymetry and related technologies.
Optech International arrived in 2001 to provide direct support to JALBTCX and is the first subsidiary of Ontario-based Optech Inc., which develops, manufactures and supports advanced laser-based surveying, mapping and imaging instruments. In the 1980s Optech pioneered airborne laser bathymetry and developed the compact laser rangefinder. It's the largest manufacturer of
lidar systems in world.
Optech International is a leader in the evolution of bathymetric lidar technology, and has handled research projects for JALBTCX and the Office of Naval Research. Now it's gearing up to make high-tech lidar products in Mississippi.
The technology
LIDAR stands for Light Detection and Ranging, an optical remote sensing system that measures the properties of scattered light to find range and other information of a distant target. The system is not new to South Mississippi.
In 2003 the Optech-made CHARTS (Compact Hydrographic Airborne Rapid Total Survey) aerial surveying equipment was turned over to the Navy. Jointly developed by the Navy, Canada and Optech, CHARTS lasers fire 1,000 pulses a second to survey shallow water while lasers firing 9,000 pulses a second do topographic surveying. It takes one digital image per second. Placed aboard a
Beechcraft, the system looks downward through a port in the fuselage and has surveyed near-shore areas across the globe for the Navy and other federal customers.
But technology doesn't stand still.
For the past two years Optech International has been involved in looking at the potential of bathymetric system to support anti-mine warfare. Optech International developed an algorithm to do seafloor imaging and classification that would supply information into an anti-mine warfare system. At a later stage, they will look at making it smaller for possible use in an unmanned aerial
vehicle. As far back as 2003 during the turnover of CHARTS, a Navy official said he could envision a day when small lidar devices are placed on UAVs to survey the littoral coast for war fighters.
But that project has already had a payoff, with some of the technology finding its way into a new lidar system that provides a wider range of environmental parameters and can "see" in turbid waters. Called the Coastal Zone Mapping and Imaging Lidar (CZMIL), it will be built in Mississippi. It was developed in partnership with the University of Southern Mississippi to aid in JALBTCX's coastal and hydrographic mapping missions.
Grady Tuell, president of Optech International, expects the first system to be produced in the fall of 2010. Then, assuming all goes well, sometime in 2011 the production line will begin. - David Tortorano
