[slate]
So I think of Landsat as something like the Earth’s family photo album. You can go back
in time and see the progressive changes that have occurred over the last
50 years. And when we think about all of the
changes in forcing that have occurred - the rise
in global population, climate change. It’s very
important to have this sort of long-term record to see how Earth’s
vegetation, ice sheets, coastal areas, coral
reefs are being affected by both human activity and natural changes
And so it’s incredibly valuable to have
this archive and continue with it.
[slate]
[slate] So first I'm really
looking forward to a successful launch. You know when you’ve worked on a project like this for 6 years
hundreds of people have contributed to the mission success. And so
we’re really looking forward to seeing Landsat 9 achieve orbit
become power positive when the solar panels deploy
and acquire its first imagery successfully.
After that over the next 10 years I’m really looking forward to
having two observatories on orbit at once providing really high-quality
data. Um, what’s really gratifying is to see when
land managers, scientists take
advantage of the data that we’ve worked hard to provide. And that’s what really gratifying
That’s what’s really gratifying about the Landsat program. It continues to provide benefits
five decades into the mission. [slate]
[slate]
Satellites provide a key vantage point for monitoring
the Earth and changes on the Earth. For one thing they can cover a lot of
ground very quickly.
We image all of the Earth’s land area
with two Landsat satellites every 8 days. And it's
very difficult to do that with ground observations. In addition
we can see parameters that are difficult to measure from
the ground. We see a variety of wavelengths going out into the infrared with Landsat.
Other satellites that NASA and other space agencies
have launched see other aspects as well. They use radar
or measure gravity. So it really provides a comprehensive view
of the planet and with great frequency
every few days for example.
[slate]
Landsat supports a variety of
applications that help with agriculture and food security.
First of all we can identify the types the crops
that are growing both nationally world-wide really at the field scale.
um, So we can basically create a crop inventory
every year and understand how the types of crops that we grow
have changed. We can also monitor crop health on a field scale
and so we can look at areas that may be affected by disease
or drought and get an early warning of that.
And then finally Landsat is used to look at the
water consumption of crops with the
thermal infrared channel we can actually measure the amount what we call evapotranspiration
or the amount of water that is fed to the atmosphere from growing
crops. And that again is an indicator of crop heath.
as well as how the crops are being managed.