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It has been in operation for the past 50 years and is anticipated to keep photographing the Earth for the ensuing 50. NASA"s groundbreaking Landsat satellite.

The Landsat 9 satellite was launched by NASA last September, continuing a long line of significant satellites. Jim Irons, who has worked on Landsat since 1992, described how the first Landsat operated in an interview with Tech Crunch. The first Landsat had two instruments and functioned like a TV camera with analogue data.

"The Multi-Spectrum Scanner was a more experimental device that Hughes [Aircraft Company] persuaded NASA to include to the payload. Moreover, it offered digital data "he declared. It was a device that produced a digital image by scanning a path at 7–14 Hz beneath the orbital path of the sensor using an oscillating mirror that went back and forth. It"s mechanical, too! It was incredible.

One of the first women to work in the aerospace industry, Virginia Norwood was the female engineer who created the sensor.

Mapper scene data was briefly privatised and sold to USGS for $600, but it was eventually brought into line with NASA standards, and in 2008 the data was made available without payment. At the time, Google and Amazon just copied a sizable image of the Earth and made it available to their consumers.

Landsat 8 and 9 have been deployed with better and more sophisticated sensors throughout time, and they have helped to gather priceless data.

The message we want to get through is that Landsat is complementary to that data — they don"t replace Landsat data, Irons adds when speaking about the success of commercial providers. The first is that all data gathered by NASA satellites is accessible in an open and transparent manner. Two, the USGS has kept this data archive for 50 years. In order to study the effects of climate change over a long period of time rather than just having short bursts of data, is there a commercial justification for corporations to store their data for decades? I"m not sure if there is a business case.

He continues by praising the accomplishments of the for-profit provider: "The advent of all these systems means the Landsat project has been extremely successful; it essentially created the market for them."