For these researchers, this latest setback is representative of the roller-coaster history of the two-decade-old Landsat satellite program, and their experience with it. It is a history marked, on one hand, by the spectacular research applicability of the satellite, far exceeding its initial expectations, and, on the other, by administrative and political decisions that eventually priced the data it collected out of the reach of most researchers, forcing them to abandon it as a viable tool.
The first of the Landsat series of satellites was launched by the U.S. Department of the Interior in 1972. The program was a direct outgrowth of the use of hand-held Hasselblad cameras by the astronauts in the Mercury and Gemini space programs to photograph the Earth from space, according to Paul Lowman, a geophysicist with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. These space photos enthralled geologists. The ...
