Main applications in the Earth observation - Landsat satellites
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Main applications in the Earth observation - Landsat satellites
Landsat satellites have been collecting images of the Earth's surface for more than thirty years. NASA launched the first Landsat satellite in 1972, and the most recent one, Landsat 7, in 1999. Instruments onboard the satellites have acquired millions of images of the Earth. These images provide a unique resource for people who work in agriculture, geology, forestry, regional planning, education, mapping, and global change research (see Figure 1).
Since the Landsat project's inception in 1965, Landsat has stood at the forefront of space-based Earth observation and has been the trailblazer for remote sensing as we know it today. But the forty-year history of Landsat has been tumultuous. The program has been variously administrated by a multitude of government agencies and a private company; consequently, the program documentation has become widely disseminated over the course of the seven Landsat missions.
In an effort to gather Landsat's technical documentation, the NASA Landsat Project Science Office (LPSO) is teaming with the U.S. Geological Survey and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Library to create an archive of essential Landsat documentation. The archive, dubbed the Landsat Legacy, will house technical-, policy- and science-related documents with an emphasis on internal technical papers. Journal articles and other privately copyrighted materials are outside the scope of the project. It is the project's ultimate goal to have an online freely accessible archive of Landsat documentation that can be used by the general public by late 2006.
In order to gather the forty years worth of documentation, the LPSO is soliciting those who have been involved with the Landsat program for Landsat-related materials that have been stored in personal archives. The registration process involves entering basic information about these documents into a web-based registration system. The LPSO will review the registration records, select appropriate materials, and subsequently contact potential donors to arrange a method of document submission. Once pertinent documents have been scanned, cataloged and archived, the Landsat Legacy document repository will provide a valuable resource for future generations of Landsat data users.
Applications of LandSat data
Landsat data have been used by government, commercial, industrial, civilian, military, and educational communities throughout the United States and worldwide. The data support a wide range of applications in such areas as global change research, agriculture, forestry, geology, resource management, geography, mapping, water quality, and oceanography.
Both Landsat 5 and Landsat 7 continue to provide important observations of the Earth. The design of the Landsat 5 satellite, which was launched in 1984, has lasted longer than anticipated and has established a tremendous record for reliability. Landsat 7 continues to provide the global science community with a wealth of data.
As of August 2005, USGS ground stations have collected more than 543,000 scenes for the U.S. archive. This network of ground stations, along with the ability to record data to an onboard solid state recorder, allows virtually complete global coverage. [1]
