NASA has successfully launched an earth monitoring satellite Landsat 9 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
Background
Landsat Program is a series of Earth-observing satellite missions.
These missions are jointly managed by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey.
This program is the world's longest continuously-acquired collection of data of space-based moderate-resolution land remote sensing data.
The mission is to collect data on the forests, farms, urban areas and freshwater of our home planet, generating the longest continuous record of its kind.
Landsat data have contributed to our understanding of Earth in many ways — from measuring the speed of Antarctic glaciers, to tracking the use of water crop fields in the Western US, to monitoring deforestation in the Amazon rainforest.
About
About LANDSAT 9
LANDSAT 9 program is a partnership between NASA and Earth Resources Observation and Science Center, north of Sioux Falls.
The Landsat 9 joins Landsat 8 and these satellites will together collect images of Earth’s surface.
It will take 8 days to capture the whole Earth.
The main focus is repeating global observations for monitoring, understanding and managing Earth's natural resources.
Landsat 9 aboard the two instruments- the Operational Land Imager 2 (OLI-2) and the Thermal Infrared Sensor 2 (TIRS-2).
OLI-2
OLI-2 is a push broom sensor that can see the light that we can’t see.
It captures sunlight reflected off Earth’s surface and studies the visible, near-infrared, and short wave infrared portions of the spectrum.
TIRS-2
It is an instrument that has a four-element refractive telescope and photosensitive detectors that capture thermal radiation and help study the Earth’s surface temperature.