…the world’s longest-running, Earth-observing satellite program. The first Landsat satellite was launched July 23, 1972, from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The 40-year Landsat record provides global coverage that shows large-scale human activities such as building cities and farming. The program is a sustained effort by the United States to provide direct societal benefits across a wide range of human endeavors, including human and environmental health, energy and water management, urban planning, disaster recovery and agriculture.
Landsat images from space are not merely pictures. They contain many layers of data collected at different points along the visible and invisible light spectrum. A single Landsat scene taken from 400 miles above Earth can accurately detail the condition of hundreds of thousands of acres of grassland, agricultural crops or forests. “Landsat has given us a critical perspective on our planet over the long term and will continue to help us understand the big picture of Earth and its changes from space,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. “With this view we are better prepared to take action on the ground and be better stewards of our home.”
In cooperation with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), a science agency of the Interior Department, NASA launched six of the seven Landsat satellites. The resulting archive of Earth observations forms a comprehensive record of human and natural land changes. “Over four decades, data from the Landsat series of satellites have become a vital reference worldwide for advancing our understanding of the science of the land,” said Interior Department Secretary Ken Salazar. “The 40-year Landsat archive forms an indelible and objective register of America’s natural heritage and thus it has become part of this department’s legacy to the American people.”
NASA is preparing to launch the next Landsat satellite, the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM), in February 2013 from Vandeberg. LDCM will be the most technologically advanced satellite in the Landsat series. LDCM sensors take advantage of evolutionary advances in detector and sensor technologies to improve performance and increase reliability. LDCM will join Landsat 5 and Landsat 7 satellites in Earth orbit to continue the Landsat data record. “The first 40 years of the Landsat program have delivered the most consistent and reliable record of Earth’s changing landscape,” said Michael Freilich, director of NASA’s Earth Science Division in the Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “We look forward to continuing this tradition of excellence with the even greater capacity and enhanced technologies of LDCM.”
Additionally, NASA soon will open a new chapter of discovery using enhanced Landsat Earth-observing data in a…
…state-of-the-art, high-performance computing and data access facility called NASA Earth Exchange (NEX). This new facility is a virtual laboratory that will allow scientists to tackle global Earth science challenges with global high-resolution satellite observations. After extensive development and testing, NASA is making the NEX facility available to the research community for further research and development. With NASA’s state-of-the-art supercomputing capacity, researchers can use NEX to explore and analyze large Earth science data sets in hours rather than months. Scientists can produce complex, interdisciplinary studies of world phenomena and share their findings instantly on the NEX platform.
“Because of the large volume of high-resolution Landsat data, scientists who wanted to study the planet as a whole prior to NEX needed to invest tremendous amounts of time and effort to develop high-end computational methods rather than focus on important scientific problems,” said Tsengdar Lee, high-end computing program manager at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “NEX greatly simplifies researchers’ access to and analysis of high-resolution data like Landsat.”
This new facility boasts a large collection of global data sets and analysis tools from NASA and other agencies, including surface weather records, topography, soils, land cover and global climate simulations. Using NEX, scientists now can fit Landsat scenes together like a giant jigsaw puzzle to create snapshots of global vegetation patterns containing more than a half-trillion pixels in less than 10 hours. These global vegetation products, referred to as the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, complement the more standard products from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on NASA’s Aqua satellite but with 10 times higher resolution.
“The science community is under increasing pressure not only to study recent and projected changes in climate that likely impact our global environment and natural resources, but also to design solutions to mitigate, or cope, with the likely impacts,” said Rama Nemani, a senior Earth scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. “We want to change the research paradigm by bringing large data holdings and supercomputing capabilities together, so researchers have everything they need in one place.”
Developed by a team at Ames, NEX combines Earth-system modeling, remote-sensing data from NASA and other agencies, and a scientific social networking platform to deliver a complete research environment. Users can explore and analyze large Earth science data sets, run and share modeling algorithms, collaborate on new or existing projects and exchange workflows and results within and among other science communities. Scientists believe costs and time associated with research development may be reduced significantly by allowing NEX members to collaborate instantly in this type of large-scale supercomputing work environment. For example, NEX may relieve researchers from redundantly retrieving and integrating data sets and building modeling analysis codes.
NEX uses Landsat data, which constitute a large collection of images collected over 40 years by a series of satellite sensors. The enhanced collection of Landsat data gives scientists the opportunity to study and understand changes on a planetary scale, looking at one-quarter acre at a time. NASA, in cooperation with the Interior Department and its science agency, the U.S. Geological Survey, launched the first Landsat satellite in 1972. The resulting 40-year archive of Earth observations from the Landsat fleet supports the improvement of human and environmental health, biodiversity, energy and water management, urban planning, disaster recovery and crop monitoring. The Landsat program is jointly managed by NASA and the Interior Department.
