How Landsat Works

From the petroglyphs of ancient societies to the stunning views of our planet from space, humans have endeavored to visualize and accurately map our world. As early geographers recorded the experiences from travelers and merchants, they created lists of places and geographic features. To spatially represent these data, geographers mapped the distances between features from the perspective of the traveler. Maps have aided navigation, settled disputes, and illustrated the extent of an Empire's power. The desire to discover what was beyond the edges of the map - to venture into the unknown - brought about an Age of Exploration that continues into the 21st century with space exploration. (http://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/page_id=6704)

Today, an array of Earth-looking satellites helps us visualize and monitor the surface of the Earth in greater detail than early geographers could have imagined. One of those satellite programs is Landsat. It monitors land use and changes. Landsat is more than just a camera with a great zoom lens orbiting Earth. Landsat measures light reflected by Earth from the sun. The light that Landsat measures reveals a lot about the earth's surface, since different surface features reflect various types of light. (http://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/?p=5139)

In this lesson, learners will review electromagnetic radiation (light), how various wavcelengths of light are reflected from Earth's surface features and monitored by instruments on Landsat satellites. Using Landsat data sets, learners construct multispectral images, analyze and interpret the multispectral images to discover applications in both life an dphysical sciences.

Next Generation Science Standards addressed in this lesson:
    HS-PS4-5.A     HS-PS4-5.C     HS-LS2-6     HS-ESS3-1