While the breakthrough is good news for the wine and grape industry, which loses billions of dollars a year to the crop-ruining disease, it could eventually help global agriculture as a whole.
"The ultimate vision is to be able to do this from space—and not just for grapes and not just this one disease and not just a few places in California, but to be able to do this for farmers all over the world, for many different crops and many different diseases and pests," said Ryan Pavlick, a research technologist at JPL who worked on the grape project.
The leafroll virus is primarily spread across vineyards by the endemic mealybug, and once the disease takes hold the only treatment is removal—costing the U.S. wine and grape industry some $3 billion in damage and losses annually, researchers said. Researchers flew the AVIRIS-NG, or the next-generation Airborne Visible/InfraRed Imaging Spectrometer developed at JPL, over about 11,000 acres of vineyards near Lodi.