1014
November 2014
PHOTOGRAMMETRIC ENGINEERING & REMOTE SENSING
I N T E R V I E W
Conducted with members of the Landsat Legacy Project Team;
Darrel Williams, Global Science & Technology; Terry Arvidson,
Lockheed Martin; Jim Irons, NASA GSFC; Laura Rocchio and
Carol Russell, Science Systems and Applications, Inc.; and Sam
Goward, University of Maryland.
PROFESSIONAL
INSIGHT
LANDSAT LEGACY PROJECT
What exactly is the Landsat Legacy Project?
The Project is an effort to capture the technical history of
the Landsat mission and to preserve the documentation
associated with the program. We’ve collected information
from a wide variety of sources, including oral histories of
people involved with Landsat from the very beginning. Our
goal is to publish a book containing the 42+ year history of
the Landsat mission.
What inspired the team to do it?
NASA Landsat Project Science Office (LPSO) members
Darrel Williams and Sam Goward were serving on the
USGS EROS National Satellite Land Remote Sensing Data
Archive (NSLRSDA) Federal Advisory Committee (FACA)
to guide USGS development of the US Landsat archive, the
only one of its kind. USGS Archivist John Faundeen showed
tables of howmany Landsat scenes were in the archive. Sam
and Darrel asked to see annual and seasonal maps. When
we saw the maps, we discovered that the coverage varied
over time. Why? No one knew the answer.
We were driven by curiosity and professional commit-
ment. Landsat is an important step in human history and
a unique asset to the world. Documents and memories fade
away quickly once people move on to other projects or retire.
How did the team get together in the first place?
It started as a grass roots LPSO effort. Terry Arvidson,
Sam Goward, Darrel Williams and others were working on
a journal article about the data archive. We realized that
the documentation could be better, and that the history
of mission configuration and operations had never been
captured in writing. Many of the individuals involved,
particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, were retired and some
had died. Darrel, as head of LPSO, decided to find a way
to rectify this and recruited members of the staff, Laura
Rocchio and Terry Arvidson, to develop the Landsat Legacy
project with Darrel’s and Sam’s contributions.
These initial efforts fell under “other duties as assigned”
but we soon realized we needed to do so much more than
what we could accomplish doing on the side. Then the NASA
History Office put out a call for proposals to write history
books of unspecified NASA missions. We pulled together
a team to respond to the proposal and fortunately, were
selected.
What did you discover while doing the project that
surprised you?
As you can imagine, we had trouble finding documents.
No one thought documents from the early 80’s would be
useful or that anyone would care about them. Boxes of
documents were tucked away every place you could imagine,
in garages after someone retired; in file cabinets marked for
destruction. Those that did make it to the archive, usually
from a project reaching its completion date, were hard to
get. We had to convince the powers that be to transfer
the information to us. We were an anomaly and people
questioned our legitimacy.
Once we were able to obtain documentation and from
our interviews with Landsat veterans, we discovered other
surprises:
• The range/complexity of technical and political factors
that explained the variation of observatory coverage
• The details of the critical role that the long-lived
Landsat 5 played in maintaining coverage from
1984-2013
• The Landsat 1, then called the Earth Resources
Technology Satellite, Spacecraft Structural Model was
completely destroyed in the high-capacity centrifuge
at Goddard Space Flight Center
• The common perception is that technology flows from
the military/intelligence community to the civilians;
however, some of the Landsat technology was first
developed by civilians and was later used by the
military/intelligence community, such as multispectral
imaging, sensor configurations, detector materials.
• In 1972, Russia purchased our excess wheat inventory
for pennies on the dollar after their wheat crop failed
and before the US was aware of the failure. This made
people in Congress very nervous and Landsat’s driving
mission of agriculture monitoring was reinforced
with dedication to the LACIE, Large Area Crop
Inventory Experiment, and AgRISTARS, Agriculture
“Landsat inspires passion in
the people who work on it.
We want to get the story out
about this program which we
care so much about.”
“It gave my mom bragging rights.”
