The Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corporation has won the contract to build the Operational Land Imager for the Landsat Data Continuity Mission to the Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corporation. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre announced the decision in July.
The OLI will be the principal sensor on the spacecraft, which is expected to be denoted Landsat-8 when it is launched in 2011.
The news is significant: it is proof positive that the US government has re-committed to the Landsat project. The contract is the first allocation of public money towards the construction of flight systems for the long awaited, long discussed mission.
The Landsat program, it seems, is safe until 2012 at least. Then, presumably, parsimonious legislators will once again be looking for someone else to carry the load.
If so, it will simply be the continuation of a long tradition. Since 1972, successive Landsats have provided an unbroken record of the Earth. Their users have admired them, but US taxpayers have been less enthusiastic. Since the inception of the program, they have been trying to find other ways to fund them.
In 1979, in what was to be the first of many such manoeuvres, US president Jimmy Carter transferred Landsat operations from NASA to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), intending this should be the first step in the privatisation of the Landsat effort.
In 1985, Eosat, a joint venture of Hughes Aircraft and RCA, was selected by NOAA to operate the system under a ten year contract. Eosat operated Landsats-4 and -5, had exclusive rights to market Landsat data, and was to build Landsats-6 and -7. In 1989, this program collapsed when NOAA’s funding ran out and NOAA directed that Landsats-4 and -5 be shut down.
An act of United States Congress provided emergency funding for the rest of the year. The story was repeated over the next two years, while NOAA pleaded with user agencies in the US government to share the load.
In 1992, Congress decided to act. It authorised the procurement of Landsat-7 and assured the continued availability of Landsat images via the Eosat contract.
Landsat-6 was launched in October 1993, but failed to reach orbit. Landsat-7 went better. It entered service in April 1999 and was operated by the USGS without incident until December 2005. But then the scan line corrector, a device that provides forward motion compensation, failed.
Following the launch of Landsat-7, the US government had yet another go at a private enterprise solution to fund the next satellite in the series, which was expected to fly in the middle of the decade. However, this idea was scrapped when talks between NASA and industry collapsed.
In August 2004, baulking at the cost of building the satellite, the US government directed federal agencies to put a Landsat-type sensor on board the National Polar orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS), which was then being planned by NOAA.
There were numerous technical and administrative difficulties with this idea, and – also in December 2005 – the Office of Science and Technology Policy directed NASA to acquire a single spacecraft for the LDCM. USGS officials also agreed to buy data from non-US satellite vendors to cover any shortfall between the failure of Landsat-5 and the launch of Landsat-8.
A note on www.landimaging.gov devoted to the future of US remote sensing efforts, says the US government remains committed to some kind of public/private partnership for the Landsat mission. However, there seems to be a growing recognition that the economics of middle resolution remote sensing do not stack up. For highresolution work, there are multiple commercial clients. But even then, most of the world’s ‘commercial’ satellites are essentially funded by the military. They provide anchor clients that may well pay for 90 per cent of the overall project costs. There is essentially no other user base that would be prepared to pay the cost of space-based remote sensing.
Whatever the travails in the US, the rest of the world has been a beneficiary of the Landsat program. In Australia, the Centre for Remote Sensing in Canberra has an archive of material that goes back, more of less unbroken, to 1972. It has been the primary source of moderate resolution remote sensing and the friend of a generation of land managers of all sorts.
Nevertheless, over the last few years ACRES executives have been sufficiently concerned by their exposure to the Landsat program to propose a number of contingency plans should Landsat-5 fail. These usually involve either the Indian Remote Sensing satellites offered by Antrix in Bangalore, or the China-Brazil Remote Sensing
Satellite (CBERS) series.
Moreover, in a break with tradition, the centre has entered into a new arrangement with the Japanese space agency – JAXA – to collect and archive data from the Advanced Land Observation Satellite (ALOS). It is not yet clear to what extent this data archive will provide continuity to the Landsat archive.Meanwhile, in the US, momentum towards Landsat-8 is slowly building. The contract for the OLI, which includes some on orbit support over the five years following launch, is valued at US$127.9 million ($155 million).
NASA will be responsible for building the satellite and for on orbit acceptance. It will be operated – in the same way as previous Landsats – by the US Geological Survey.
The OLI instrument will provide 15 metre panchromatic and 30 metre multi-spectral spatial resolution. The swath width will be 185 kilometres. Revisit time will be 16 days.
In an operational sense, the OLI will replace the Enhanced Thematic Mapper instrument on Landsat-7.
Ball Aerospace has contracted to deliver the instrument by September 2010. The company is also believed to be competing for the contract to build the Landsat spacecraft bus – its physical structure, attitude controls, power and communications modules. NASA officials are expected to make a decision on this contract in November.
Jonathon Powers is a freelance engineering writer living in Sydney.
