It has been in operation for the past 50 years and is anticipated to keep photographing the Earth for the ensuing 50. NASA’s groundbreaking Landsat satellite.
The Landsat 9 satellite was launched by NASA innovative last September, continuing a long line of significant spacecraft. Jim Irons, who has worked on Landsat since 1992, described how the first Landsat operated in an interview with Tech Crunch. The first Landsat had two instruments and functioned like a TV camera with analogue data.
“The Multi-Spectrum Scanner was a more experimental instrument that Hughes [Aircraft Company] persuaded NASA to add to the payload. Moreover, it offered digital data “he declared. It was a device that scanned a path at 7–14 Hz underneath the orbital plane using an oscillating mirror that went back and forth.
One of the first women to work in the aerospace industry, Virginia Norwood was the female engineer who created the sensor.
Mapper scene data was briefly privatised and sold to USGS for $600, but it was later brought into line with NASA standards, and in 2008 the data was made available without charge. At the time, Google and Amazon simply copied a sizable image of the Earth and made it available to their customers.
Landsat 8 and 9 have been launched with better and more sophisticated sensors over time, and they have helped to gather priceless data.
The message we want to get across is that Landsat is complementary to that data — they don’t replace Landsat data, Irons says when speaking about the success of commercial providers. The first is that all data gathered by NASA satellites is accessible in an open and transparent manner. Two, the USGS has kept this data archive for 50 years.
In order to observe the effects of climate change over a long period of time rather than just having short bursts of data, is there a business case for companies to archive their data for decades? I’m not sure if there is a business case.
He continues by praising the accomplishments of the for-profit provider: “The emergence of all these systems indicates that the Landsat project has been extraordinarily successful; it
