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Landsat 7 Satellite Might Be Dead

Posted by timothy on from the pings-go-unanswered dept.

Lord Satri writes "Landsat 7 ETM+ remote sensing satellite, probably the most important Earth Observation satellite, might be dead now. This would have very important repercussions on the remote sensing / space community."

2 of 35 comments (clear)

  1. "very important repercussions" ? by VisorGuy · · Score: 4, Informative

    "This would have very important repercussions on the remote sensing / space community."

    From the website
    "For current multispectral imagery, please be aware that Landsat 5 TM, EO-1 Advanced Land Imager (ALI), and ASTER may provide useful data alternatives."

    Doesn't sound like total gloom and doom to me; but what do I know, I'm no asstronomer...

    --
    This user account is inactive account replaced by the PDA
  2. Oh, yeah, suuuuure it's "dead" by stanwirth · · Score: 5, Insightful

    During the Reagan administration, when a high-resolution statellite instrument to measure the earth's geoid and topography was suddenly found to be extremely useful in locating submerged submarines (by way of their wakes) it, too, suddenly "went dead." I knew the guy at Lamont-Doherty Geophysical Lab who discovered how to recover the submarine wakes from these data. Funny how only the high-res instrument (the one that could detect submarine wakes) suddenly "went dead." The low-res instrument continued to return data. It was an open secret in the geophysical community that the high-res instrument didn't actually have a malfunction. Funny how the US won the cold war with a few years after that, too. Hrmmm.

    It was also the Reagan administration that privatised LandSat -- after spending billions of taxpayer's dollars to develop and deploy the LandSat satellites and do additional TM work from the space shuttle, suddenly all of the imagery was owned by a private company. And government-sponsored projects, instead of paying like $350.00 per scene, suddenly had to spend $3500.00 per scene. Double that to account for "University Overhead." What I want to know is, why, after paying for the development and deployment of this technology, do we (as taxpayers) then have to pay for it again when a project is formed to analyse these data? Didn't seem right at the time. Still doesn't seem right.

    But I honestly doubt the LandSat 7 TM instrument actually went dead. It was probably found to be returning data of military significance, and why bother with the political rigamarole with the scientific research community, not to mention the delay involved with classifying data -- when you can just claim the thing "went dead"? After all, who is going to make the trip to the thing itself to verify the claim that it "went dead"?