NASA Launches Most Advanced Earth Satellite

[struggle4progress]

First Posted: Feb 11, 2013 10:33 PM EST

Landsat 8, the latest and most advanced satellite in the Landsat family, has made its way into orbit Monday, building up on a 40-year legacy of Earth’s monitoring satellites ...

Under mostly clear skies, Atlas 5, a United Launch Alliance rocket, was launched at 10:02am (PST) from its deployment center at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. It had a 78-minute flight ahead of it ...

... The National Aeronautics and Space Administration paid for the satellite, the instruments and the Atlas 5 rocket, performing overall systems engineering and controlling early orbit operations. The U.S. Geological Survey will take control of the spacecraft once it is commissioned and will be responsible for mission operations, data processing and archiving ...

http://www.scienceworldreport.com/articles/4894/20130211/nasa-launches-earth-satellite.htm

[littlemissmartypants]

1. The USGS

ROCKS. eom

[littlemissmartypants]

2. track tropical-forest trends eom

[littlemissmartypants]

3. Kick again...

“The data are much more sensitive to change across the landscape and over time,” says Jim Irons, project scientist for the mission at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Maybe we will be able to better differentiate corn from sorghum, for example, or maple trees from oak trees.”

[littlemissmartypants]

4. Images from the Landsat satellite series

Images from the Landsat satellite series show the Aral Sea in central Asia shrinking significantly from 1977 to 2010 because of water diversion for agricultural use.
Image: USGS EROS Data Center

http://www.nature.com/polopoly_fs/7.8793.1360140935!/slideshowimage/1_aral_sea.jpg

[littlemissmartypants]

5. Excellent catch, struggle4progress!

Thank you. Love, Peace and Shelter. lmsp

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=landsat-8-satellite-set-to-resucue-global-change-observations

[DreamGypsy]

6. My own, infinitesimal, contribution to satellite engineering..

I arrived in Palo Alto, CA, in June of 1974, looking for a summer job to provide me food, shelter, and gasoline until I began graduate work in mathematics at Stanford. I interviewed at a pizza place. Some materials supply company wanted an 'expediter' - I bombed out when I couldn't explain why some customer would want high-carbon steel.

I eventually found a potential employer - an aerospace company that had a contract for GOES satellites. The company had 5 or 6 software developers (this is 1974, remember) and a couple were working on an contract for HCRAMP - Harness Cable Routing and Mass Properties - for the GEOS satellite program.

What did this mean? Satellites have a lot of wires connecting various devices; the wires have mass (ie. weight). Sending weight into space requires energy, so minimizing the weight means less rocket power. Given a fixed size cable, minimizing weight means reducing the overall length of cable. The cables in a satellite (at least in 1974) were routed through a harness - a rectilinear jacket connecting the devices in the satellite. Minimizing weight meant finding minimum paths for all the cables that needed to pass through the harness.

My interviewers for the job questioned me about this problem. They even handed me a book with a discussion of a minimum path algorithm to apply to the problem. I read it quickly and understood it as a simple recursive algorithm. I said "Sure, that makes sense. Easy to implement." I got the job.

Though I didn't have much software experience, I entered the Fortran code for the algorithm on the first afternoon on the job. Unfortunately, I didn't remember that one needed to do a special operation to 'Save' the last 5 hours work on the Honeywell 6060. Oops. For the next couple weeks, the mass properties guy (Phil - he was REALLY into rattlesnakes) and I worked on the routing algorithm and the mass properties computations. Eventually, that code was used for several GOES satellites. Certainly it has been superseded by more sophisticated and precise algorithms.

But even now, when I look at NOAA weather predictions, I wonder...is some of my code involved?...is that why it's raining and freezing on this, predicted, sunny day?