Earth Matters

You’ve Come a Long Way, Landsat

June 10th, 2013 by Mike Carlowicz

Today’s guest post is from Kate Ramsayer of the NASA Earth Science News Team. Kate wrote the caption for today’s Image of the Day about El Paso and the mountains of data collected by Landsat over four decades.

When the first Landsat satellite — originally called the Earth Resources Technology Satellite (ERTS) — launched in 1972, it was no small feat to visualize the data it sent back and to conduct research with it.

“When ERTS was first launched, there was one cathode ray tube in the country that could take in the digital data and display an image,” said Jeff Masek, Landsat project scientist at NASA Goddard.

In the early years, satellite observations of the light reflected off of Earth were transmitted to receiving stations and mailed to processing centers. Computers translated the image data into photographic prints or transparencies that could be placed on light tables for interpretation. Alternatively, computers translated the numbers in each pixel into alpha-numeric symbols that were printed on large reams of paper. Analysts, often graduate students, could then color-in the symbols with crayon or magic markers. Standing on ladders over the colored-in data, they’d try to visualize the landscape represented by the maps.

“Things were pretty primitive in those days,” Masek said. “People say, ‘Why didn’t they produce a global land cover map in those first few years?’ They were lucky to be able to look at one image for a Ph.D. dissertation.”

Read more about the history of Landsat in “Landsat Looks and Sees.”

Here is the first published image from ERTS…nee, Landsat 1.

dallas_ms1_19720725

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