Research Facilities

The BSRSI remote sensing research laboratory is a 6,500 square foot facility in Room 101 of the Manly Miles Building, a 30,000 sq. ft facility dedicated to land use and cover change research on the MSU East Lansing campus. It provides offices and research space for faculty, graduate students and technical personnel. BSRSI computing facilities include a Silicon Graphics (SGI) Origin 200 server and an SGI Origin 2000 supercomputer serving three SGI Octane workstations and six SGI O2 workstations. Two NT servers support 27 Windows NT workstations, web hosting, and several PCs. A four-terrabyte near-line robotic server and over 600 gigabytes of fixed format disks provide real time access, and a robotic jukebox is used for CD-ROM publishing.

Available software includes site licenses for all ESRI software, including ArcInfo,ArcIMS, ArcView, MapObjects, and the Spatial Database Engine (SDE), ERDAS Imagine, SQLserver, ENVI, SpaceStats and SAS statistical software, and Oracle RDBMS. The lab also utilizes an SGI Varsity license. Output is provided by two large format photo quality HP printers, two color laser printers, a Tek dye sublimation printer, and several standard HP black printers. The lab maintains an internal network at 100 Mb connected to the university 1,000 Mb backbone and Internet-2. Click here for a VRML tour of our lab!

Academic Facilities for Teaching and Training

BSRSI has a dedicated teaching facility with 12 NT workstations with ERDAS, Arc/Info, and other remote sensing and GIS software. This facility is used as a training facility for visiting scientists, mid-career professionals, and research and applications oriented training. It is often used as a site for ESRI training classes. Undergraduate and graduate teaching labs are available through the Department of Geography, supported by BSRSI. A 16-seat NT laboratory is used for GIs and remote sensing training at the undergraduate level. A 15-seat Sun Ultra-30 workstation laboratory is used for graduate level teaching and for graduate student research and class projects.

Conference and Meeting Facilities

BSRSI also maintains a conference facility with access to dynamic addressing ports so workshop participants can plug their laptop computers directly into the Internet. The BSRSI conference facility includes LCD projection, electronic whiteboards, and video connection through the MSU telecommunications systems, including live NASA broadcasting. BSRSI also has access to video conferencing and to a complete range of facilities throughout the university.

Data and Information Systems

Among other data in its holdings, BSRSI maintains the largest non-government Landsat archive, with over 5,000 scenes from around the world. Information systems have been developed through research and technical collaboration with industry leaders including ESRI and include web-based GIS and other information access systems.