![]() ![]() Operations of the fourth and fifth Landsat satellites were turned over to the private sector, leading to dramatic price increases, with the cost of a single Landsat image rising to several thousand dollars. But as the paper’s authors explain, “It was believed with certainty that the data and imagery would have commercial, as well as public value” if more of it could be collected.Įarly attempts at public-private partnerships to facilitate commercialization may have further hampered broader results. Gaps in time data, coarse imagery, and the need for more input from other systems hampered any comprehensive results. However, as noted in the 1997 paper, “The Landsat Program: Its Origins, Evolution, and Impacts,” none of the early attempts at using satellite data to address global issues like food security, desertification trends, resource sustainability, and deforestation impacts led to more profound, worldwide applications. Images from the MSS were proven effective for improving crop predictions in Kansas and were used to monitor clear-cutting of forests in Washington and evaluate compliance with timber harvest licenses. Flood dynamics along the Mississippi River and Cooper’s Creek in Australia were studied for disaster assessment. Landsat 1 data were used to monitor water levels of Lake Okeechobee and build a better understanding of Miami’s local ecology and its water needs. Now that researchers could access calibrated images of the same areas over the course of the seasons and years, attention moved away from merely building libraries of the spectral signatures of Earth’s features and toward monitoring changes and patterns over time. The MSS sent back 300,000 images over its six-year lifespan and changed scientists’ approach to remote sensing, adding the dimension of time to analyses of Earth’s resources and surface covers. After launch, the engineers at NASA and the scientists at the US Geological Survey (USGS)-who would manage the project once the satellite was in orbit-were shocked at the high fidelity of the data the chattering imager sent back, and it almost immediately became the vehicle’s primary imager. Expectations for the scanner, whose scan mirror buzzed distressingly during testing as it whirred back and forth at 13 times per second, were low.Īmong the concerns voiced before launch were fears that its moving parts would not work properly in space, but it was also unknown whether a scanner could produce high-quality digital imagery while careening around the planet at a speed of 14 orbits per day. ![]() When NASA launched the Earth Resources Technology Satellite, later known as Landsat, in July 1972, the first spacecraft dedicated to monitoring Earth’s surface carried two imaging instruments-a camera and an experimental multispectral scanner (MSS) that recorded data in green and red spectral bands and two infrared bands. ![]()
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