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(on-screen text) Landsat 9: Continuing the Legacy

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Mike O'Brien: It was a Friday night even, and it was about 10:00 PM.

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And I got a phone call cause I'm on call.

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Basically, had the operator explain that the antenna stopped moving during setup.

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Narrator: This is Mike O'Brien recounting a call that every ground station engineer dreads:

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The antenna is down and you have less than two hours to fix it

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before the satellite needs to make contact with it.

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Mike O'Brien: Um, I drove to site.

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It was exactly what I thought it was at the time.

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It was a software problem and the antenna drove itself into a limit.

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When it does that, it kills power to the antenna

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and it has to be manually manipulated to move out of that area.

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So I, you know, put the harness on,

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you know, got into the lift, went up to the axis.

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Um, you have to open that, uh, housing doors, which is no big deal.

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And then you crank the hand crank,

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which physically moves the antenna

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and it moved in out of that limit area.

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I had about 12 minutes left before the next pass started.
(on-screen text) Episode 3: More Than Just a Pretty Picture

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Narrator: Let's take a step back to explain why,

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apart from strapping yourself to a lift 30 feet in the air,

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this is a stressful situation.

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A Landsat satellite orbits the earth every 99 minutes,

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furiously collecting images of everything below it with each pass.

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Much like the storage on your phone quickly decreases

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as your pictures of cute dogs increase,

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Landsat's storage is also limited.

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Which is why the satellite makes contact with a ground station

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every few hours to offload its data.

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But what if the ground station is down?

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Well, in that case, Landsat's internal harddrive fills up

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and doesn't capture the next round of images.

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Critical data is lost.

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Luckily, that is extremely rare and data is hardly ever lost...

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especially with a workflow like this:

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Mike O'Brien: So every time a Landsat 8 image comes in,

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I record on four independent different pieces of equipment.

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That way, if there's a failure, I still have three other great copies.

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Narrator: We couldn't really tell the story of data

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without mentioning Landsat's data renaissance

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when a landmark decision changed earth science forever. 

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In 1990, Landsat data cost as much as $4,000 per "scene".

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Usually scientists require several of these "scenes" to do their research.

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As you can imagine, the cost was a major obstacle.

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In 2008, Landsat took down its paywall. 

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Kristi Kline: I recall having one of our international cooperator meetings

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and a woman from Russia was there

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and she gave a briefing that really highlighted the importance of free data

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basically saying how it was democratizing for countries like hers,

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where suddenly you had an open source of information where,

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anybody could get access and see what was going on on the face of the earth. 

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Narrator: Kristi Kline manages the entire Landsat data archive,

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nearly 50 years of it.

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She knows first hand how hungry the

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science community is for Landsat products.

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The first year scenes were available for free,

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downloads jumped exponentially. 

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Kristi Kline: In 2008, we had over a million downloads.

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And today, we typically get 15 to 20 million each year.

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Narrator: Which brings us to our next segment…

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Look at these. Stunning, right?

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WRONG

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I mean, well yes, they are gorgeous,

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but they are also a consistent record of change over time. 

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At its most basic level,

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it's easy to see how Earth has changed since Landsat 1 launched in 1972.

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Just look at an early image and then compare it to a current one.

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Maybe it's changed a lot, maybe a little,

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but that's about all you can say.

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Landsat provides more than just pictures, though

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From space, it sends back verified scientific data in multiple wavelengths.

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With Landsat, we can quantify exactly how much each 30-meter by 30-meter pixel has changed.

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And with the full Landsat archive available at no cost,

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you can track the complete progression of each pixel throughout the season.

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And you can do that for millions of pixels at a time.

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Has a piece of land changed from wetlands to suburban housing?

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Did forests become farmland?

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Or, looking closer, have *these* pixels of forest become stressed

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due to insect damage?

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Are *those* pixels of farm fields suffering from drought?

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With carefully calibrated Landsat data,

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it is possible to answer these questions for the whole globe.

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Jeff Masek: It's you know, it's a slice of human history.

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It's amazing how well for this 50 years we're documenting every change on the planet. 

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Narrator: This is Jeff Masek, Landsat 9 Project Scientist.

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Jeff Masek: My thing has always been history.

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My academic training is actually in geology,

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but the thing that I sort of loved about geology was still that kind of long time, right.

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It's just being able to, like, stand in a spot and say that,

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you know, there was an ocean here 50 million years ago,

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and I can look at the fossils that are indicated for that. 

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The thing that got me into the Landsat record was still that historical perspective

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It's not 50 million years, it's 50 years,

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but still you're seeing before your eyes,

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how the environment of forest change, how agriculture changes, urban expansion,

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the whole, the whole thing, how the planet has changed over 50 years.

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Not only can you not conserve what you cannot measure,

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you can't measure the effectiveness of conservation approaches if you can't measure the change. 

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We have limited resources, we have environmental pressures,

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we can do something about them if we have the right information.

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(on-screen text) Coming Next...
(off-screen voice) Quatre, trois, deux,

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Jeff Masek: You know, there's almost been an explosion in

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the number of Earth resources satellites,

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Earth observation satellites that are out there in the international community

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(on-screen text) Episode Four: Plays Well with Others

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Landsat is a joint program of NASA and USGS