When Remote Sensing Satellites Were First Launched....
Did you know that the first photographs of the Earth’s surface were taken during the early Apollo missions as practice for mapping the Moon? These early photographs provided the stimulus for launching the Landsat satellites in the 1970s - a program that provided the first civilian uses of satellite data - and is still going strong today. In today’s world of commercial satellites ringing the Earth, it seems almost quaint to remember that one of the arguments used most often against the Landsat program was that high-altitude aircraft could do the job just as well. In fact, the story of how the Landsat program was created and the battles to get it off the ground is fascinating! Back in the 1960s and 1970s, scientists were familiar with data from weather satellites and the kinds of questions they could answer. But what else could be seen from space? And how useful was it? So, when the first Landsat satellite was launched on 23rd July 1972, the biggest questions were about the t