Holodeck

A bird’s-eye view of our planet’s nooks and crannies.

SCIENTISTS LOVE DRONES. They provide a bird’seye view of our planet’s nooks and crannies at a resolution that satellites can’t match and at a price even they can afford.

Take the doughty scientists who count royal penguins at Macquarie Island in the Southern Ocean. Each summer when the penguins arrived to breed, researchers had to pull on boots, brave the ferocious weather and count them.

Jarrod Hodgson, a drone expert at the University of Adelaide, helped them out by mounting a powerful SLR camera on a fixed-wing “FX79” drone flown at 125 metres above the ground. The drone isn’t just quicker; it’s an order of magnitude more precise than ground-based counts.