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the blue marble

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that was our first

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view

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of ourselves

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we really are the blue planet we're

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hanging out here in the middle of

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in fact apollo imagery was part of the

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justification for putting together a

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satellite

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that would look at the earth

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that satellite was the first landsat

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the landsat mission now holds the title

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for the longest continuous space-based

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at least one landsat satellite has been

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orbiting the earth since 1972 that's

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nearly 50 years of steadfast observation

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the program was born in the midst of

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several historical flashpoints during a

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time when the world was changing quickly

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well it really was a perfect storm we

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had a lot of technology coming out of

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world war ii

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with air flown censors

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we also

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had an awareness of the environment

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between rachel carson even stuart udall

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wrote a book called the quiet crisis

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those two things together the space race

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all of those came together

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but the landsat story doesn't actually

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start with nasa it starts with the

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united states geological survey

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there were a couple of really

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interesting players the primary one is

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william t pecora

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and he was director of the u.s

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geological survey

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his boss was stuart udall he tried

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floating it around and it didn't quite

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make it department of defense the cia

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nasa

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which was just beginning at that point

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they all said nan you know this isn't

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the right time

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so in 1966 pakora and udall announced

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that okay fine department of interior

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will launch

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and so that caused a big kerfuffle and

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and the bottom line was that nasa was

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forced to step up and say yeah okay

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we'll do it but let's pause for a second

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obviously there was a big push to make

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an earth observing satellite but what

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exactly did it need to do

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landsat's entire job is to collect light

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visible light like this and non-visible

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light like this

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after landsat captures the light it sees

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it can make two kinds of pictures true

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color images and false color images

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did you know your eyes can only detect

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red green and blue it sounds crazy but

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it's true in fact if you took a

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magnifying glass to the screen you're

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probably looking at right now you'd see

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a jumble of red green and blue dots mix

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those colors together with different

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intensities and your brain interprets

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all the colors of the rainbow true color

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images are made by combining red blue

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and green light but what's even more

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amazing landsat also captures infrared

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light beyond what we can see and that

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light can reveal some incredible things

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when you look at a false color image

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like the difference between types of

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plants how healthy those plants are

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healthy coral reefs and even dead coral

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reefs fire tracking ocean pollution the

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possibilities are nearly endless

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in fact i bet you've probably seen

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landsat's influence on pop culture

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without even knowing it from google

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earth and works of art to television and

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movies

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and i should know

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before my untimely smushing by an 85

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foot tall great ape deep into the film i

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your narrator played landsat steve in

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kong skull island but i digress now back

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to our story

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nasa and usgs get to work largely under

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the direction of lead engineer virginia

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norwood who was often called the mother

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of landsat

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norwood and her team had to design an

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experimental instrument the

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multi-spectral scanner that had never

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been flown in space before we took a

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and nasa took a real gamble to

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propose a scanner for this that with

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quite a bit of skepticism

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to assuage the skeptics and test the

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scanner's capabilities the team loaded

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up the test model on a truck and headed

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to yosemite and this was because

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nobody believes that scanner will work i

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think you better

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the true test came when landsat 1

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launched on july 23rd 1972

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sadly william t pecora one of the

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project's original champions died just

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three days before landsat took its place

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in orbit

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but with this launch the united states

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and soon the world would step into a new

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paradigm of earth observation

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never before seen snapshot of land

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resources in the environment would be

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key for critical decision making decades

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it's impossible to predict really the

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exact lifetime of one of these birds

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but we hope that the

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spacecraft can go on perhaps for another