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Landsat 9: Continuing the Legacy

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Terry Arvidson: The Blue Marble.

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That was our first view of ourselves!

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We really are the blue planet. We’re hanging out here in the middle of nowhere….

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Episode One: Getting Off the Ground

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In fact the Apollo imagery was part of the justification for putting together a satellite

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that would look at the Earth.

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Marc Evan Jackson: That satellite was the first Landsat.

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The Landsat mission now holds the title

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for the longest continuous space-based record of Earth’s land in existence.

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At least one Landsat satellite has been orbiting the Earth since 1972.

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That’s nearly 50 years of steadfast observation.

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The program was born in the midst of several historical flashpoints

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during a time when the world was changing quickly.  

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Terry Arvidson: Well it really was a perfect storm.

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We had a lot of technology coming out of WWII with air-flown sensors.

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We also had an awareness of the environment between Rachel Carson.

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Even Stewart Udall wrote a book called the Quiet Crisis.

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Those two things together, the space race… all of those came together.

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Marc Evan Jackson: But the Landsat story doesn’t actually start with NASA.

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It starts with the United States Geological Survey.

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Terry Arvidson: There were a couple of really interesting players.

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The primary one is William T. Pecora and he was the director of the U.S. Geological Survey.

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His boss was Stewart Udall.

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He tried floating it around and it didn’t quite make it.

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Department of Defense, the CIA, NASA – which was just beginning at that point -

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They all said, nah, you know, this isn’t the right time.

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So in 1966, Pecora and Udall announced that, "Ok fine."

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“Department of Interior will launch.”

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And so that caused a big kerfuffle and the bottom-line was that NASA was forced to step up.

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Marc Evan Jackson: But let’s pause for a second.

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Obviously, there was a big push to make an Earth-observing satellite.

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But what exactly did it need to do?

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Landsat’s entire job is to collect light.

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Visible light like this, and non visible light like this. 

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After Landsat captures the light it sees,

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it can make two kinds of pictures:

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True color images and false color images.

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Did you know your eyes can only detect red, green and blue?

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It sounds crazy, but it’s true.

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In fact, if you took a magnifying glass to the screen you’re probably looking at right now,

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you’d see a jumble of red, green, and blue dots.

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Mix those colors together with different intensities

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and your brain interprets all the colors of the rainbow.

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True color images are made

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by combining red, blue and green light.

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But what’s even more amazing?

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Landsat also captures infrared light beyond what we can see.

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And that light can reveal some incredible things when you look at a false color image.

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Like the difference between types of plants,

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how healthy those plants are,

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healthy coral reefs and even dead coral reefs,

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fire-tracking, ocean pollution…

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The possibilities are nearly endless.

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In fact, I bet you’ve probably seen Landsat images without even knowing it.

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From Google Earth and works of art to television and movies.

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And I should know.

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Before my untimely smushing by an 85-foot tall Great Ape

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deep into the film,

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I, your narrator, played Landsat Steve in Kong: Skull Island.

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But I digress.

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Now back to our story!

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NASA and USGS get to work largely under the direction of

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lead engineer Virgina Norwood who was often called the “Mother of Landsat.”

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Norwood and her team had to design an experimental instrument,

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the Multispectral Scanner, that had never been flown in space before.

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Virginia Norwood: We took, and NASA took a real gamble,

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to propose a scanner for this,

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that with quite a bit of skepticism.

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Marc Evan Jackson: To assuage the skeptics and test the scanner’s capabilities

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the team loaded up the test model on a truck and headed to Yosemite.

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Virginia Norwood: And this was because nobody believes that scanner will work.

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I think you better give us some assurance.

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Marc Evan Jackson: The true test came when Landsat 1 launched, on July 23, 1972.

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Sadly, William T. Pecora, one of the project’s original champions,

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died just three days before Landsat took its place in orbit. 

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But with this launch, the United States and soon the world,

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would step into a new paradigm of Earth observation.

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Never-before seen snapshots of land resources and the environment

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would be key for critical decision making decades into the future.

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Coming next…

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GE Engineer: It's impossible to predict really

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the exact lifetime of one of these birds.

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But we hope that the spacecraft can go on perhaps for another year,

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perhaps another two years,

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bringing down the data, as it has been doing.

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Episode Two: Designing for the Future

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Landsat is a joint program of NASA and USGS