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[slate]

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[slate]

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So I think of Landsat as something like the Earth’s family photo album. You can go back

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in time and see the progressive changes that have occurred over the last

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50 years. And when we think about all of the

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changes in forcing that have occurred - the rise

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in global population, climate change. It’s very

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important to have this sort of long-term record to see how Earth’s

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vegetation, ice sheets, coastal areas, coral

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reefs are being affected by both human activity and natural changes

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And so it’s incredibly valuable to have

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this archive and continue with it.

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[slate]

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[slate] So first I'm really

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looking forward to a successful launch. You know when you’ve worked on a project like this for 6 years

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hundreds of people have contributed to the mission success. And so

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we’re really looking forward to seeing Landsat 9 achieve orbit

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become power positive when the solar panels deploy

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and acquire its first imagery successfully.

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After that over the next 10 years I’m really looking forward to

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having two observatories on orbit at once providing really high-quality

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data. Um, what’s really gratifying is to see when

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land managers, scientists take

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advantage of the data that we’ve worked hard to provide. And that’s what really gratifying

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That’s what’s really gratifying about the Landsat program. It continues to provide benefits

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five decades into the mission. [slate]

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[slate]

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Satellites provide a key vantage point for monitoring

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the Earth and changes on the Earth. For one thing they can cover a lot of

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ground very quickly.

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We image all of the Earth’s land area

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with two Landsat satellites every 8 days. And it's

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very difficult to do that with ground observations. In addition

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we can see parameters that are difficult to measure from

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the ground. We see a variety of wavelengths going out into the infrared with Landsat.

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Other satellites that NASA and other space agencies

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have launched see other aspects as well. They use radar

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or measure gravity. So it really provides a comprehensive view

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of the planet and with great frequency

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every few days for example.

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Landsat supports a variety of

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applications that help with agriculture and food security.

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First of all we can identify the types the crops

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that are growing both nationally world-wide really at the field scale.

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um, So we can basically create a crop inventory

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every year and understand how the types of crops that we grow

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have changed. We can also monitor crop health on a field scale

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and so we can look at areas that may be affected by disease

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or drought and get an early warning of that.

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And then finally Landsat is used to look at the

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water consumption of crops with the

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thermal infrared channel we can actually measure the amount what we call evapotranspiration

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or the amount of water that is fed to the atmosphere from growing

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crops. And that again is an indicator of crop heath.

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as well as how the crops are being managed.