From Space to Farm

01I really like to think of Landsat as a very sophisticated smartphone camera orbiting the earth.

02Every 16 days it has fully captured imagery from all over the globe.

03I can literally drive around the Corn Belt, and I've done this at times, and see what's going on on the ground, and then also see it in the Landsat imagery.

04It's a verification that what we see in the imagery is actually what's happening on the ground.

05This is NASA's Curious Universe.

06Our universe is a wild and wonderful place.

07I'm Patti Boyd, and in this podcast, NASA is your tour guide.

08In this episode, we're going out to space.

09But not too far beyond our atmosphere, we're going to turn back around and take a look at Earth.

10We're exploring how data collected from space can help farmers on the ground.

11We're talking about a mission called Landsat.

12NASA is engaged in the Landsat program because we observe the Earth from space.

13We observe it for many purposes.

14We observe it to help understand the atmosphere and how it's changing, the oceans and how the oceans are changing.

15And finally, the land surface is the Earth and the vegetation and the impact of the humans on our resources and how we use those resources.

16That's Jim Irons.

17He's the director of the Earth Sciences Division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and also the project scientist for Landsat 8.

18Landsat is a joint mission of NASA and the U.S.

19Geological Survey, or USGS.

20It holds the title for the longest continuous record of our home planet's surface from space.

21Since 1970, Landsat has archived images and data of Earth, offering scientists information about how our world is changing.

22But it also does something pretty surprising.

23This data helps farmers.

24A farmer can look at Landsat data and determine basically how well their crops are doing.

25They can look at the crop report from the National Agricultural Statistical Service and determine what crops are being grown in their region or across the country so they can make decisions about planting in the next year.

26We can learn a lot from Landsat data and imagery.

27We use the imagery to literally try to establish what type of crop is growing in every field across the United States.

28To identify that field as corn or sory beans or wheat or cotton, rice, go on down the list.

29David Johnson works for NASS, N-A-S-S, the National Agricultural Statistics Service.

30He's a geographer and also a member of the Landsat Science Team.

31He says that the Landsat imagery is crucial to the information NASS provides to farmers and consumers.

32Once we establish what we think is growing in each field, we aggregate that up to come up with a statistic for the amount of corn area in a state like Iowa or soybean area in a state like Illinois or wheat in a state like Kansas.

33It's really for all the states, all the crops.

34Farmers rely on this information to make decisions about crops.

35Those decisions have far-reaching implications that can even impact what you see on your dinner plate.

36So it ends up impacting commodity prices as people try to understand if there's going to be a supply, an extra supply of grain in a given year or maybe a deficit of grain in a given year.

37So Landsat is another tool in our disposal that helps us get at those area estimates.

38Landsat provides us with a long record of information about the health and changes of our planet.

39So much so that it's hard to picture a world without it.

40But to really understand Landsat, we have to step back in time and look at where it all began.

41I would say Landsat was way ahead of its time when it was first conceived and launched almost 50 years ago.

42When it began in the 1960s, the program was still called the Earth Resources Technology Satellites.

43We tracked down someone who was there at the very beginning, Valerie Thomas.

44Before she got to NASA, Valerie had never even seen a computer before.

45So she started from scratch, learning everything she could about them.

46Valerie recorded her end of this interview on an old tape cassette recorder.

47First of all, I was an only child.

48And I was very curious.

49Now, my father was into electronics.

50He was into electronics and photography.

51Now, when I first went to the library, and I came across the book, and I was so excited.

52It must have been like three or four inches thick.

53And it was the boy's first book in electronics.

54And I looked through and I saw these projects.

55And all I could think about was taking this home and my father would show me how to do these projects.

56I took it home.

57And my father said, oh, I can do that.

58And I can do that.

59And I can do that.

60And I can do that.

61But he didn't show me how to do anything.

62So my book ended up sitting on the table until it was time to return it to the library.

63And I sort of got the impression that that was my father's way of saying, electronics is not for girls.

64Just go and do what your mother does, sewing and hair, which I did.

65But I still wanted to know about electronics.

66I wanted to know what makes things tick.

67My pursuit in growing up and going through college prepared me to not be afraid of the unknown and to try to figure things out.

68That pursuit got Valerie to NASA just a few years before the Landsat program started.

69She was tasked to work on Lacey, a solution to a problem the U.S.

70was facing.

71When the first Landsat satellite was launched in 1972, it occurred just after an event that became known euphemistically as the Great Grain Robbery.

72During that time, the U.S.

73stockpiled a lot of wheat.

74And if a country was having a problem with wheat yield or some other problem with crop failure, they could contact the U.S.

75And there was a project that was started based on the, I should say, crop failure in wheat in one of the countries, one of the large countries.

76And they went a lot.

77It turns out it was so much, it caused a lot of problems for the U.S.

78to be able to satisfy the requirement.

79Okay?

80The nation wasn't aware of the problems in the rest of the world and sold the grains from our storage at a relatively low price.

81In fact, a real low price.

82It turned out that our farmers could have made a lot more money if they had known of the shortage.

83There was a project that I worked on called Lacey Large Area Crop Inventory Experiment.

84And when my first semester in graduate school, I was given the opportunity to go down to Johnson Space Center, where the Large Area Crop Inventory Experiment was organized.

85It was a multi-agency organization and learned a bit about how that effort was being approached.

86Lacey was a project that showed for the first time that global crop monitoring could be done with Landsat satellite imagery.

87That there was a way for the U.S.

88to keep an eye on our crop from a global scale.

89When I went to Johnson Space Center and started working, being introduced to people working with Landsat data, they assigned me a supervisor.

90He convinced me about how important the observations from space in general and how the Landsat program in particular, how exciting it was, and that it was really the future of Earth science to a large degree, and how it would drive what we know and understand about the Earth from this point forward.

91And to say that wasn't an overstatement.

92Landsat really did drive many of our discoveries about Earth.

93The whole point of the program, and the reason it's important to NASA and to the nation, and for that matter to the world, is that we're trying to understand the state of the Earth, of the Earth system, and how it is changing over time.

94Landsat helps us do that in a unique way.

95The imagery we get from Landsat goes beyond what the human eye can see, even though it uses technology we're all familiar with.

96While Landsat provides compelling images of the Earth's surface from space, its sensors are actually well-calibrated scientific instruments.

97I really like to think of Landsat as a very sophisticated smartphone camera orbiting the Earth.

98It captures not only visible imagery, so what you and I would see with our eyes, but also parts of the electromagnetic spectrum in the near-infrared and thermal infrared.

99Landsat?

100So a Landsat image looks a lot like a digital image, maybe taken from very high up over the surface of the Earth.

101The difference is that your digital camera records information for the blue, green, and red portion of the spectrum that matches the response of our eye.

102Landsat satellites go beyond what our eye is able to see, so Landsat collects images for that visible portion of the spectrum, but also gives us a lot more information.

103It goes into the infrared, where our eyes are not as sensitive.

104If you wanted to look at a Landsat image to get an idea about the state of the Earth, you can combine information from the multiple wavelengths of light that go beyond what our eyes can see.

105We call those false color images.

106And they can tell us about crop health.

107Those false color images have the ability to emphasize or highlight certain features of the Earth.

108And it's those aspects that really let us get a strong clue about crop health, crop progress, crop condition.

109And we can train computers to recognize those patterns and then produce maps that show the different types of land cover, the different types of vegetation on the surface of the Earth.

110And you start combining multiple images of the same area taken over time.

111Then you can analyze how those patterns are changing over time and infer even more information about the surface of the Earth.

112And so it's that digital imagery that we can piece together and overlay from back in time with the current data to give us an idea how things have changed in terms of where crops are being grown, if the crop health is better this year than it was last year or 10 years ago.

113And that record of information helps us keep track of the Earth's changes.

114We can see a lot from Landsat data.

115And we can make music with it, too.

116Let's take a listen to what a long record of Landsat data might sound like.

117You hear that?

118The high-pitched strings plucked periodically indicate the acres of land where six of the world's major crops are grown.

119Those are corn, soybeans, wheat, alfalfa, cotton, sorghum.

120The higher the pitch, the more acreage Landsat recorded.

121Every slap of the guitar is a year, starting in 1995.

122Let's listen again with that in mind.

123The high-pitched strings.

124The high-pitched strings.

125The high-pitched strings.

126The high-pitched strings.

127The high-pitched strings.

128The high-pitched strings.

129The high-pitched strings.

130The high-pitched strings.

131The high-pitched strings.!

132The high-pitched strings.

133The high-pitched strings.

134The high-pitched strings.

135The high-pitched strings.

136The high-pitched strings.

137The high-pitched strings.

138The high-pitched strings.

139The high-pitched strings.

140The high-pitched strings.

141The high-pitched strings.

142What you just heard is called data sonification.

143Music driven by data.

144Like a chart for your ears.

145Listening to data helps us think about it in new ways.

146Like in this one.

147You can hear the acreage growing.

148As the pitch of the guitar strings gets higher.

149Now we can look at decades of information on crop health with accuracy.

150But that wasn't always the case.

151The Landsat program's early technology paved the way for that possibility.

152Landsat was digital way before most of us knew what a digital camera was.

153So it really was ahead of its time.

154There's a lot we can tell from Landsat data and imagery today.

155But the program had humble beginnings.

156It took a few visionaries, like Valerie, to set the groundwork.

157I got on Landsat in 1970.

158The first Landsat was launched in 1972.

159So I got in on that project at a very early stage.

160During that time, to write programs, you had to be either a mathematician, engineer, or scientist.

161Turns out during that time, there were no computers at people's desks.

162The computer was in another building.

163They had a key punch machine because we were still doing key punch.

164There weren't these various apps and operations and other kinds of things that people use now.

165Back in those days, Landsat scenes were analyzed almost one at a time.

166Some of it was computerized analysis, but it was slow.

167Daily, a mounting volume of imagery going to a long list of subscribers at universities and research agencies, as well as individuals around the world.

168Providing us with a more complete view of that world than we've ever had before.

169When I first started working with Landsat data, we'd print out information on an alphanumeric printer.

170Man began the first comprehensive inventory of his earthly resources.

171And he launched a valuable new means of obtaining information needed to manage those resources for his future well-being.

172We'd hang those printouts on a wall and sometimes color them in with magic marker or colored pencils.

173Birds, a new chapter in space, is in fact a new chapter in man's effort to prove himself worthy of his earthly heritage.

174When I got back to Penn State, I was really ahead of the game of what would watch a single image drop into a television display, like one line of pixels at a time.

175And then I would work at night and turn off the lights so I could record those maps on a film camera and then tape them into my thesis.

176It took a while for the infrastructure, for computing, to catch up to that.

177But with the really the foresight those minds and engineers had in the past, the historical data is very important also because we need to look in the past to get an idea of what's happening in the current day and for understanding if something really is an anomaly or not.

178Thanks to that long record of data, we can see things like spikes and anomalies.

179We can track changes over time.

180And we can ensure there's not another great grain robbery.

181Because we can track how our crop health and supply are changing over time.

182Eight Landsat satellites have been launched since 1972.

183And NASA plans to launch a new one in the fall of 2021.

184Landsat 9, which will continue Landsat's legacy and contributions to us here on Earth.

185The technology has just grown over my career in ways that I had never imagined.

186But I think some of the people who began the Landsat program back in the 60s, maybe they were more prescient than I ever was and kind of envisioned the growth of the program, the growth of the technology as it is today.

187This is NASA's Curious Universe.

188The Curious Universe team includes Klaus Meyer, Michaela Sosby, Margo Wall, and Vicki Woodburn.

189Our executive producer is Katie Atkinson.

190Special thanks to Ryland Hegey, System Sounds, Mike Vellee, and the Landsat team.

191If you liked this episode, please let us know by leaving us a review, tweeting about the show at NASA, and sharing us with a friend.

192Overall, the project was excellent.

193When I was going through it, I felt like the female version of Superman, able to jump over tall buildings in a single bounce and faster than a speeding bullet.

194That's what I felt like.

195Still curious about NASA?

196You can send us questions about this episode or a previous one, and we'll try to track down the answers.

197You can email a voice recording or send a written note to nasa-curiousuniverse at mail.nasa.gov.

198Go to nasa.gov slash curiousuniverse for more information.