Mostrando entradas con la etiqueta NASA's Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM). Mostrar todas las entradas
Mostrando entradas con la etiqueta NASA's Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM). Mostrar todas las entradas

domingo, 2 de junio de 2013

NASA - Landsat 8 Satellite Begins Watch

Landsat 8 Set to Extend Long Run of Observing Earth
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Posted on May 29, 2013 at 2:03 pm
Last update 3:13 pm By: Jon Campbell
An ash plume drifts from Paluweh volcano in Indonesia. Image taken April 29, 2013 from the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM, now Landsat 8) Operational Land Imager instrument. Courtesy NASA.
The latest in the Landsat series of Earth observation satellites, Landsat 8, officially begins its mission on May 30 to extend an unparalleled four-decade record of Earth’s land surface as seen from space. The Landsat program is a joint effort between the U.S. Geological Survey and NASA.
NASA launched the Landsat Data Continuity Mission satellite on February 11. Since then, NASA mission engineers and scientists, with USGS collaboration, have been putting the satellite through its paces – steering it into its orbit, focusing the instruments, calibrating the detectors, and collecting test images. Now fully mission-certified, the satellite will be transferred to USGS operational control and renamed  Landsat 8.
As the world’s population surpasses seven billion people, the impact of human society on the planet is increasing. The continuation of Landsat’s four-decade look at Earth will help monitor those impacts and more accurately forecast future environmental change.

A big picture, yes, but more
Landsat images from space are not just pictures. They contain many layers of data collected at different points along the visible and invisible light spectrum. Consequently, Landsat images can show where vegetation is thriving and where it is stressed, where droughts are occurring, and where wildland fire is a danger.
Landsat satellites give us a view as broad as 12,000 square miles per scene while describing land cover in units the size of a baseball diamond. From a distance of more than 400 miles above the earth surface, a single Landsat scene can record the condition of hundreds of thousands of acres of grassland, agricultural crops, or forests.
Landsat images reveal subtle, gradual changes, such as Wyoming rangelands greening up after a drought, as well as massive landscape changes that occur in rapidly growing urban areas. Landsat can also provide broad assessments of sudden natural or human-induced disasters, such as the number of acres charred by a forest fire or the extent of tsunami inundation. Landsat data have been used to monitor water quality, glacier recession, sea ice movement, invasive species encroachment, coral reef health, land use change, deforestation rates, and population growth.
LDCM image acquired March 22, 2013. LDCM looks back to its launch site at Vandenberg Air Force Base. Courtesy NASA.

The USGS role in observing Earth
USGS and NASA have distinct roles in the Landsat program. NASA develops remote-sensing instruments and spacecraft, launches satellites, and validates their performance. The USGS then assumes ownership and operation of the satellites, in addition to managing ground-data reception, archiving, product generation, and distribution.
USGS has managed the operations of two Earth observing satellites — Landsat 5 and 7 — for over a decade.
Launched in 1984, Landsat 5 orbited the planet over 150,000 times while transmitting over 2.5 million images of land surface conditions around the world, long outliving its original three-year design life. In December 2012, USGS announced that Landsat 5 would be decommissioned.  The durable satellite delivered precise images of Earth for nearly 29 years, making it the longest-operating Earth-observing satellite mission in history as noted by the Guinness Book of Records.
Landsat 7, launched in 1999, continues to provide daily information about our planet from space, although an instrument problem reduces the amount of data it collects.

Landsat 8 brings a clearer view  
Landsat 8 is about the size of a delivery truck with a 30-foot-long deployed sheet of solar panels. Stocked with a 10-year supply of fuel, the satellite travels at a speed of 17,000 miles per hour.  It carries two highly-sensitive observation instruments, the Operational Land Imager (OLI) and the Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS). Advanced technology increases the reliability and sensitivity of these instruments, while the improved measurements are still compatible with the past Landsat data record.
The technical capabilities of Landsat 8 move forward in three areas in comparison to Landsat 7:  increased spectral coverage; higher data precision (the ultimate resolution is not changed); and increased quantity of data collection (60% more scenes per day).
Landsat 8 will orbit Earth once every 99 minutes at an average altitude of 438 miles (705 kilometers),  repeating the same ground track every 16 days.  As Landsat 8 joins Landsat 7 in imaging the Earth, researchers and natural resource managers will once again be able to receive Landsat data every eight days for any given location. Many Landsat users depend on a short repeat cycle for prompt data on resources such as agricultural crops, forests, and water.  The USGS, NASA, and aerospace contractors have worked diligently to ensure that Landsat 8 would be operational in time for the 2013 North American growing season.
Even in notoriously warm Phoenix, AZ, the Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) aboard LDCM (now Landsat 8) shows cooler (darker) areas of irrigated agriculture (lower center of image) and mountain forests to the North. Courtesy NASA.

Free data for innovation
Beginning May 30, Landsat 8 data will be available from the USGS data archive free of charge. The Department of the Interior and USGS policy of unrestricted access and free distribution of Landsat data encourages researchers everywhere to develop practical applications of the data.  Special-purpose applications of Landsat data can serve commercial endeavors in agriculture and forestry; they can enable land managers in and out of government to work more efficiently; they can assist scientists in defining and assessing critical environmental issues. Ready access to authoritative Landsat images provides a reliable common record of Earth conditions that advances the mutual understanding of environmental challenges worldwide by citizens, researchers, and decision makers.
Two visually compelling examples of commercial systems that access the long record of consistent Landsat data to document land cover change around the globe are Google Timelapse and ESRI Change Matters.
Additional information
USGS Landsat Missions  (latest satellite status and related information)
Come Fly With Me (a colorful video that allows viewers to see the Earth as the satellite does)

Related:

Landsat 8 Satellite Begins Watch
 
 
WASHINGTON -- NASA transferred operational control Thursday of the Landsat 8 satellite to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in a ceremony in Sioux Falls, S.D.

The event marks the beginning of the satellite's mission to extend an unparalleled four-decade record of monitoring Earth's landscape from space. Landsat 8 is the latest in the Landsat series of remote-sensing satellites, which have been providing global coverage of landscape changes on Earth since 1972. The Landsat program is a joint effort between NASA and USGS.

NASA launched the satellite Feb. 11 as the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM). Since then, NASA mission engineers and scientists, with USGS collaboration, have been putting the satellite through its paces -- steering it into its orbit, calibrating the detectors, and collecting test images. Now fully mission-certified, the satellite is under USGS operational control.

"Landsat is a centerpiece of NASA's Earth Science program," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden in Washington. "Landsat 8 carries on a long tradition of Landsat satellites that for more than 40 years have helped us learn how Earth works, to understand how humans are affecting it and to make wiser decisions as stewards of this planet."

Beginning Thursday, USGS specialists will collect at least 400 Landsat 8 scenes every day from around the world to be processed and archived at the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science Center in Sioux Falls. The newest satellite joins Landsat 7, which launched in 1999 and continues to collect images. Since 2008, USGS has provided more than 11 million current and historical Landsat images free of charge to users over the Internet.

"We are very pleased to work with NASA for the good of science and the American people," said U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell in Washington. "The Landsat program allows us all to have a common, easily accessible view of our planet. This is the starting point for a shared understanding of the environmental challenges we face."

Remote-sensing satellites such as the Landsat series help scientists observe the world beyond the power of human sight, monitor changes to the land that may have natural or human causes, and detect critical trends in the conditions of natural resources.

The 41-year Landsat record provides global coverage at a scale that impartially documents natural processes such as volcanic eruptions, glacial retreat and forest fires and shows large-scale human activities such as expanding cities, crop irrigation and forest clear-cuts. The Landsat 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.

With Landsat 8 circling Earth 14 times a day, and in combination with Landsat 7, researchers will be able to use an improved frequency of data from both satellites. The two observation instruments aboard Landsat 8 feature improvements over their earlier counterparts while collecting information that is compatible with 41 years of land images from previous Landsat satellites.

For more information about the Landsat mission, visit:  
 
NASA
Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui
ayabaca@gmail.com
ayabaca@hotmail.com
ayabaca@yahoo.com
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sábado, 26 de enero de 2013

NASA - NASA Sets Media Events for Landsat Mission Launch From California

WASHINGTON -- The launch of NASA's Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) satellite is scheduled for Monday, Feb. 11, from Space Launch Complex 3 at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Liftoff aboard an Atlas V rocket is targeted to occur at the opening of a 48-minute launch window at 1:02 p.m. EST (10:02 a.m. PST).

LDCM is a joint NASA and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) mission. It is the eighth satellite in the Landsat series, which began in 1972 and will add to the longest continuous data record of Earth's surface as viewed from space. LDCM will extend global land observations that are critical in many areas, such as energy and water management, forest monitoring, human and environmental health, urban planning, disaster recovery and agriculture.

The LDCM News Center at NASA's Vandenberg Resident Office opens Feb. 6. To speak with a NASA communications specialist there, media representatives can dial 805-605-3051. For a recorded launch status report, dial 805-734-2693.

Prelaunch and launch activities will take place Feb. 8-11. U.S. journalists should fax their accreditation requests on news organization letterhead to Kaylee Ausbun, 30th Space Wing Public Affairs Office at Vandenberg, at 805-606-4571, or email kaylee.ausbun@us.af.mil. Requests must include full legal name, date of birth and media affiliation. A government-issued photo identification will be required for entry to Vandenberg.

A prelaunch news conference and mission briefing featuring NASA and USGS scientists will be held from 3-5 p.m. EST (12-2 p.m. PST) Friday, Feb. 8, in NASA's Vandenberg Resident Office. The briefing will be carried live on NASA Television with question-and-answer capability available from NASA field centers and via Twitter with the hashtag #askNASA.

On launch day, NASA TV coverage and commentary will begin at 10:15 a.m. EST (7:15 a.m. PST). Spacecraft separation occurs one hour, 17 minutes, 58 seconds after launch. A post-launch news conference will be held approximately two hours after launch.

Live countdown coverage also will be available online. Launch updates will begin on NASA's launch blog at 10:15 a.m. EST (7:15 a.m. PST) Feb. 11. Coverage features live updates as countdown milestones occur, as well as streaming video clips highlighting launch preparations and liftoff. To view the launch blog, visit:

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., is responsible for LDCM project management. Orbital Sciences Corporation built the LDCM satellite. NASA's Launch Services Program at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida provides launch management. United Launch Alliance of Denver, Colo., is NASA's launch service provider of the Atlas V 401 rocket. After launch and the initial checkout phase, the USGS will take operational control of the satellite, and LDCM will be renamed Landsat 8.

For NASA Television downlink information, schedule information and streaming video, visit:

Landsat Senses a Disturbance in the Forest.
Landsat data for each year loops from 1984 to 2011 as we move across the changing landscape. Stops at a clear cut and two types of insect outbreaks show how scientists use the numbers that drive the color changes to understand forest dynamics. The colors represent types of land; for example, blue areas are forests; orange/yellow areas are agriculture; and purple areas are urban. Credit: NASA/Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio
› Download hi-res video

 Sensing a Disturbance in the Forest: New Landsat Imagery Tool Sees Insect Outbreaks From Space.
 http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/718683main_landtrendr_agu35_11768.jpg 
his imagery covers lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service in Washington state, Oregon and northern California.  
Credit: Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio.
 A new way of studying and visualizing Earth science data from a NASA and U.S. Geological Survey satellite program is resulting in, for the first time, the ability to tease out the small events that can cause big changes in an ecosystem.

Called LandTrendr, this computer program is able to find patterns previously buried within vast amounts of scientific data. Still in development, it's already led to seeing for the first time in satellite imagery an obscured, slow-moving decline and recovery of trees in Pacific Northwest forests.

Comparing satellite data to ground data, scientists uncovered the cause. "It was, as it turns out, bugs," says Robert Kennedy, a remote sensing specialist at Boston University, who consulted with U.S. Forest Service experts to confirm his observations.

The unexpected disturbance pattern showed a long slow decline of tree health over years followed by slow regrowth. It emerged in several areas, particularly near Mount Hood in the 1980s, peaking in 1992 when regrowth began, and near Mount Rainier where the insect outbreak lasted ten years from its onset in 1994 till the insects killed all the trees and moved on in 2004.

Kennedy created the LandTrendr program specifically to work with data from the NASA and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Landsat program. Kennedy's new way of viewing Landsat imagery has already changed how the Forest Service in the Pacific Northwest operates its yearly forest monitoring program that uses ground stations, satellite imagery and statistics to evaluate current conditions.

Kennedy says that LandTrendr works because of the unique nature of Landsat data. The data embedded in images are a scientific record of the Earth's surface that goes back 40 years. Each image, or scene, covers an area 115 miles by 112 miles (185 kilometers by 180 kilometers) and provides data for wavelengths of light reflected or emitted from the Earth's surface, which scientists use to see, for example, forest conditions not apparent in visible light. With the four-decade record, they can compare images between years and see how the land changes with time.
 
 http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/710883main_0758163.jpg
Aerial photograph of western spruce budworm outbreak at Mount Hood National Forest, Oregon.
Credit: William M. Ciesla, Forest Health Management International, Bugwood.org
Source: http://www.forestryimages.org/browse/detail.cfm?imgnum=0758163
Image Policy: http://www.forestryimages.org/about/imageusage.cfm
 Studying big areas over many years means handling big data sets and figuring out how to get all the data to work together for meaningful comparisons. One challenge in particular is finding images from the same time of year where the view of the ground is not hidden by clouds.

Kennedy's breakthrough was to combine cloud-free pixels from multiple scenes of the same area collected over the growing season in late summer. Then he compares the new images for each year to one another. By breaking a scene down into smaller sized pixels, the cloud-covered portions could be tossed away, but LandTrendr keeps the clean bits to reveal the life history of each pixel.

"We're getting better data use out of what people think of as crummier images," says Curtis Woodcock, a remote sensing specialist at Boston University who employs a similar method to Kennedy to build an image of the landscape out of Landsat data pixel by pixel.

What makes all this possible are two things: Computers are finally powerful enough to process vast amounts of data, and Landsat data is now available free of charge.
 http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/712382main_1241552.jpg
 Western spruce budworms are inactive in the winter and feed on needles of coniferous trees as mature larvae beginning in May or June. In July and August, they pupate into adult moths. Credit: Scott Tunnock, USDA Forest Service, Bugwood.org
Source: http://www.forestryimages.org/browse/detail.cfm?imgnum=1241552
Image Policy: http://www.forestryimages.org/about/imageusage.cfm 

 The Oregon Data Trail.
The Landsat program has been observing Earth's land surfaces consistently since 1972, when the first Landsat satellite, what became known as Landsat 1, went into orbit. Since then, it has compiled the longest continuous satellite record of change across our planet. But a left over pay-for-data policy from the commercialization of the program in the 1980s and 90s meant scientists rarely looked at the year-by-year evolution of a landscape. When the USGS began providing Landsat data for no charge in 2008, looking at twenty-five years or more of data became affordable as long as you had the computing power to handle it.

"Not that long ago the size of an individual Landsat scene would have crippled most desk top computers," says Doug Morton, a physical scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt Md., who uses Landsat to study changes in the Amazon and forests in Indonesia. Now with processing power doubled or more, he says, it's no problem for most desktop machines to handle a big scientific job.

When Kennedy first saw a yearly succession of moderate resolution Landsat satellite images of a 13,000 square mile area near Portland, Ore., it was a revelation. Says Kennedy, it was like looking at a pair of air photos of a forested hillside offset so that with special glasses, the image pops into three dimensional clarity. "You sort of squint your eyes and it takes a while and all of a sudden you get that moment -- boom! Oh, my god, it's a landscape!" he says. "I had that same sense [of amazement ] when I first started looking at the time series stuff."

The ability to scroll backward and forward through time and Kennedy's new technique for creating single visualizations out of millions of bits of data from hundreds of Landsat images has revealed not just the patchwork of fire scars and clear cuts -- what he was originally looking for when he partnered with the Forest Service -- but also the slow and subtle changes that take place over many years, including pulses of insect outbreaks.

"We did not expect that," says Kennedy. In the satellite imagery they had found two kinds of insect signals. The first is a classic mountain pine beetle outbreak. One near the Three Sisters volcanoes in Oregon started in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The beetles attacked lodge pole pines, the same species affected in outbreaks throughout British Columbia and Colorado.

The second, subtler signal found near Mount Hood and Mount Rainier is the western spruce budworm, an insect that moves into an area and eats the needles off the trees. Losing its green growth doesn't necessarily kill the tree, but it does put it under a lot of stress. If budworms return in following years, trees will ultimately succumb to the onslaught and die. Then the budworms, out of food, move on. And the forest gradually recovers.

Kennedy says to confirm the satellite data, they hiked into areas with recent known budworm outbreaks near Mount Rainier. With the decline and regrowth patterns from the new maps in hand, Kennedy says, "we stand out on the ground in the forest and look at all the dead trees and we realize that we're actually starting to see something that we had never been able to see before from space. It was very exciting."
 http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/712385main_5466820.jpg
 Mountain pine beetles bore into trees to lay their eggs under the bark. They introduce a fungus that prevents the tree from defending against the attack and stops water and nutrient transport within the tree. Credit: William M. Ciesla, Forest Health Management International, Bugwood.org
Source: http://www.forestryimages.org/browse/detail.cfm?imgnum=5466820
Image Policy: http://www.forestryimages.org/about/imageusage.cfm


In this flyover tour of the data set, Landsat data for each year loops from 1984 to 2011 as we move from Redwood National Forest in California north along the Cascade range to Seattle, Washington, and back south along the Willamette Valley. The colors represent types of land; for example, blue areas are forests; orange/yellow areas are agriculture; and purple areas are urban. Credit: Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio
› Download hi-res video
 
 he imagery produced by LandTrendr is a remarkable tool for looking at change over time, says Woodcock. But what he really wants to see is a move from the retrospective to the real time. He says, "The goal in the long run is to be able to provide land managers information on what's happening as it's happening." It's a process, he says, that's just getting started.

"That ability to read the story of the landscape is something that the Landsat archive allows us to do like none other," says Doug Morton of NASA Goddard. NASA and the USGS will continue providing the means to see it with the next satellite in the Landsat series, to be called Landsat 8, scheduled to launch in early 2013.

To learn more about the Landsat program, visit:
Ellen Gray
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
NASA
Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui
ayabaca@gmail.com
ayabaca@hotmail.com
ayabaca@yahoo.com  
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