WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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The data from the Landsat Data
Continuity Mission will be the best data

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that have ever been collected from a
Landsat satellite. With the increasing

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population, our land use are changing at
a rates unprecedented in human history.

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To manage and cope with these changes we
need to have the observations the

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information the data that allow us to
understand what's going on on the

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surface the Earth where most of us live.
Landsats been monitoring the surface of

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the Earth since 1972. Tracking resources
like farms, forests and water and

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checking every continent, every season
every year. Well we don't call it the

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Data Continuity Mission for nothing.
The continuity of those observations is

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a really critical part of the ability to
do the science we do on how climate

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change and how land use are transforming
our planet. The Landsat program and the

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duration of the Landsat time series is
the only record we have of these

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fundamental changes in land cover.
including melting glaciers, including the

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loss of tropical forests, including the
transformation from from small-scale

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family agriculture to large agribusiness.
After launch

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LDCM will become known as Landsat eight.
Since it's the eighth in the Landsat

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program. A partnership between NASA and
the US Geological Survey. NASA is

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responsible for building and launching
the satellite and the Geological Survey

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is in charge of operations and receiving
and archiving the data.

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LDCM carries two instruments each
covering a different part of the

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electromagnetic spectrum. The OLI
instrument monitors the Earth's surface

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in spectral wavelengths that you and I
can see and that's the visible

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wavelengths and also in just into the
infrared regions the near infrared and

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shortwave infrared regions. The
Operational Land Imager is used to track

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urban sprawl, forest loss and regrowth,
changes in farmland and the melting of

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glaciers. The Thermal Infrared Sensor
Instrument TIRS monitors the Earth in

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thermal bands which are actually images
temperature on the Earth's surface.

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With TIRS scientists are able to track
how much water is used by crops on

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individual farm fields. And the new
technology used in LDCM means that both

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TIRS and OLI will be much more
sensitive than previous Landsat sensors.

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The greatest improvement we've made in
the LDCM satellite is that the sensors

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are what's called push broom sensors and
not what was called whisk-broom sensors.

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Push broom sensors have thousands of
detectors that just image the Earth as

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the satellite passes over the surface of
the Earth. The older Landsat satellites

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Landsat 7, Landsat 5 use a whisk broom
technology which is many fewer detectors

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scanning back and forth with a
mechanical scanner. The advantage the

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push broom is each detector has a longer
time to dwell on each picture element or pixel

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on the surface the Earth. As a
consequence it creates a sensor with a

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much higher sensitivity expressed a
signal noise ratio. T-minus five-four

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three-two-one and lift off

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The LDCM Observatory launches
out of the Vandenburg Air Force Base in

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California. And launches into what's
called a polar orbit and so it it orbits

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over the North and South Poles taking
imagery on the sunlit side of the Earth

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every time it passes. It takes about a
hundred minutes to loop around the poles.

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LDCM will make 14 orbits each day and
cover the whole globe every 16 days.

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Every time they pass over the US,
Landsat satellites beam data to the USGS Earth

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resources observation and Science Center
or EROS in South Dakota one of several

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receiving stations around the world. This
Center operates the Landsat archive that

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contains all the U.S. held data from all
of the Landsat satellites and the LDCM

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data will become part of that archive.
All of the data in the Landsat archive

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at arrows can be obtained
by anyone at no cost.

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This freely available data has led to an
incredible blossoming of science

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research and applications. My favorite
part of the Landsat program is the

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opportunity to think big with free and
open access to data around the world.

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We're not limited as we once were and
our ability to conceive of and analyze

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large data sets to look at really
large-scale changes over continents, over the globe

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(Music)