Forty years ago Monday, a rocket launched from a Southern California Air Force base carrying a one-ton package into space — the beginning of an ambitious project to enhance scientific understanding of changes on the Earth’s surface.

 

Five hundred miles above the Earth, the first of the Landsat remote-sensing satellites detached from the rocket, spun into orbit and began snapping pictures to beam back to Earth.

 

Specifically, to a newly finished data center in rural Minnehaha County, South Dakota: the U.S. Geological Survey EROS Center.

 

Since then, the Landsat program has collected a staggering repository of satellite imagery — remote-sensing data, as it’s known among researchers — providing the longest continuous record of the Earth’s surface as seen from space.

 

In the 40 years since, the program’s satellites have witnessed everything from deforestation in the Amazon, drought in the Midwest to the growth of the Las Vegas strip, providing data to researchers, policymakers and commercial interests alike.

 

“When we started, the Earth-observing satellite was a new concept,” said Ron Beck, an EROS spokesman who has been involved with the program for almost 38 years.

 

Beck compared Landsat’s continuous record of Earth-surface data to a family photo album: It's a permanent record of how it has changed over time. As the data collected by the satellites became more complex — the program has two satellites in operation right now — the number and type of people who use it has mushroomed, too.

 

EROS gets data requests from fire ecologists trying to understand patterns in forest blazes, from foreign governments tracking land-use changes and from people who like the pretty pictures and want to make them into jewelry.

 

Recently, two popular applications have been in helping researchers understand the forest wildfires sweeping across the mountain states and Black Hills, and in recording the damage wrought by last year’s historic flooding on the Missouri River, Landsat project manager Kristi Kline said.

 

 

The breakthrough, Beck said, came in 2008, when EROS released its entire data set of Earth imagery into the public domain.

 

“That has just exploded the demand for data,” he said.

Apart from the growth of its clientele, the biggest change to the Landsat mission has been finding novel applications of the data with new technologies, Kline said.

 

There were no personal computers or Internet in the 1970s, and EROS researchers have come a long way from the days of using printer paper, film and markers to locate patterns.

 

Today’s consumer technology make data processing and distribution much simpler, allowing researchers to spend less time getting the data and more time analyzing it, Beck said.

 

Meanwhile, EROS is laying plans for the program’s next phase.

 

Landsat 8 is scheduled to launch in February to keep the data record continuous. Plans are also being laid for Landsat 9 and 10, although the Geological Survey cut its fiscal-year 2013 budget request for these preparations from $2 million to $250,000. (Landsat is a joint program of NASA and the Department of the Interior.)

 

(Source: Sioux Falls Argus Leader)