NASA's Curious Universe - From Space to Farm

Episode Date: November 2, 2020

Farmers rely on the accuracy of a crucial NASA and USGS mission, Landsat, to make decisions about crops. Those decisions have far-reaching implications that can impact what you see on your dinner plate!

I really like to think of Lansat as a very sophisticated smartphone camera orbiting the Earth. Every 16 days, it has fully captured imagery from all over the globe. I can literally drive around the corn belt, and I've done this at times, and see what's going on on the ground, and then also see it in the Lansett imagery. It's a verification that what we see in the imagery is actually what's happening on the ground. This is NASA's curious universe. Our universe is a wild and wonderful place. I'm Patty Boyd, and in this podcast, NASA is your tour guide.

In this episode, we're going out to space, but not too far beyond our atmosphere, we're going to turn back around and take a look at Earth. We're exploring how data collected from space can help farmers on the ground. We're talking about a mission called Lansat. NASA is engaged in the Lansat program because we observe the Earth from space. We observe it for many purposes. We observe it to help understand the atmosphere and how it's changing, the oceans, and how the oceans are changing. And finally, the land surfaces the earth and the vegetation and the impact of the humans

on our resources and how we use those resources. That's Jim Irons. He's the director of the Earth Sciences Division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and also the Project Scientist for Lansat 8. Lansat is a joint mission of NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey, or USGS. It holds the title for the longest, continuous record

of our home planet's surface from space. Since 1970, Lansat has archived images and data of Earth, offering scientists information about how our world is changing. But it also does something pretty surprising. This data helps farmers. A farmer can look at Lanset data and determine basically how well their crops are doing. They can look at the crop report from the National Agricultural State. statistical service and determine what crops are being grown in their region or across the country

so they can make decisions about planting in the next year. We can learn a lot from Lansat data and imagery. We use the imagery to literally try to establish what type of crop is growing in every field across the United States to identify that a field as corn or sory beans or wheat or cotton, rice, go on down the list. David Johnson works for NASS, N-A-S, the National Agricultural Statistics Service. He's a geographer and also a member of the LANSAT science team.

He says that the Lansat imagery is crucial to the information NASS provides to farmers and consumers. Once we establish what we think is growing in each field, we aggregate that up to come up with a statistic for the amount of corn area, in a state like Iowa, or soybean area in a state like Illinois, or wheat in a state like Kansas. It's really for all the states, all the crops. Farmers rely on this information to make decisions about crops. Those decisions have far-reaching implications that can even impact what you see on your dinner plate.

So it ends up impacting commodity prices, as people try to understand if there's going to be a supply, an extra supply of grain in a given year or maybe a deficit of grain in a given year. So Lansat is another tool in our disposal that helps us get at those area estimates. Lansat provides us with a long record of information about the health and changes of our planet, so much so that it's hard to picture a world without it. But to really understand Lansat, we have to step back and step back and time. And look at where it all began. I would say Lancet was way ahead of its time when it was first conceived and launched almost 50 years ago. When it began in the 1960s, the program was still

called the Earth Resources Technology Satellites. We tracked down someone who was there at the very beginning, Valerie Thomas. Before she got to NASA, Valerie had never even seen a computer before. So she started from scratch, learning everything she could about them. Valerie recorded her end of this interview on an old tape cassette recorder. First of all, I was an only child, and I was very curious. Now, my father was into electronics. He was into electronics and photography. Now, when I first went to the library, and I came across the book, and I was so excited, it must have been like three or four just And it was the boy's first book in electronics. And I looked through and I saw these projects.

All I could think about was taking this home and my father would show me how to do these projects. I took it home. My father said, oh, I can do that. And I can do that. I can do that. But he didn't show me how to do anything. So my book ended up sitting on the table until it was time to return it to the library. And I sort of got the impression that that was my father's way of saying,

electronics is not for girls. Just go and do what your mother does, sewing, hair, which I did. But I still wanted to know about electronics. I wanted to know what makes things tick. My pursuit, and growing up and going through college, prepared me to not be afraid. of the unknown and to try

to figure things out. That pursuit got Valerie to NASA just a few years before the Lansat program started. She was tasked to work on Lacey. A solution to a problem the U.S. was facing. When the first Lansat satellite was launched

in 1972, it occurred just after an event that became known euphemistically as the Great Grain Robbery. During that time, the U.S. stockpiled a lot of wheat and if a country was having a problem with wheat meal or some other problem with crop failure, they could contact the U.S. and there was a project that was started based on the, I should say, crop failure in wheat in one of the countries, one of the large countries. And it was a lot.

It turns out of it so much caused a lot of problems for the U.S. to be able to satisfy the requirements. Okay? The nation wasn't aware of the problems in the rest of the world and sold the grains from her storage at a relatively low price. In fact, a real low price. It turned out that our farmers could have made a lot more money if they had known of the shortage. There was a project that I worked on called Lacey, Large Area Crop Inventory Experiment. And when my first semester in graduate school, I was given the opportunity to go down to Johnson Space Center where the large area crop inventory experiment was organized. It was a multi-agency organization and learned a bit about how that effort was being approached.

Lacey was a project that showed for the first time that global crop monitoring could be done with Lansat satellite imagery. that there was a way for the U.S. to keep an eye on our crop from a global scale. When I went to Johnson Space Center and started working, being introduced to people working with Lanset data, they assigned me a supervisor. He convinced me about how important the observations from space in general and how the Lanset program in particular, how exciting it was, and that it was really the future of Earth science to a large degree and how it would drive what we know and understand about the Earth from this point forward.

And to say that wasn't an overstatement, Lansett really did drive many of our discoveries about Earth. The whole point of the program, and the reason it's important to NASA and to the nation, and for that matter to the world, is that we're trying to understand the state, of the Earth, of the Earth system, and how it is changing over time. Lansat helps us do that in a unique way.

The imagery we get from Lansat goes beyond what the human eye can see. Even though it uses technology we're all familiar with. While Lansat provides compelling images of the Earth's surface from space, its sensors are actually well-calibrated scientific instruments. I really like to think of Lansat as a very, sophisticated smartphone camera orbiting the Earth. It captures not only visible imagery, so what you and I would see with our eyes, but also parts of the electromagnetic spectrum in the near-infrared and thermal infrared. So a Lancet image looks a lot like a digital image,

maybe taken from very high up over the surface of the Earth. The difference is that a digital camera records information for the blue, green, and red portion of the spectrum that matches the response of our eye. Lansat satellites go beyond what our eye is able to see, so Lansat collects images for that visible portion of the spectrum, but also gives us a lot more information. It goes into the infrared where our eyes are not as sensitive. If you wanted to look at a Lansat image to get an idea about the state. of the Earth. You can combine information from the multiple wavelengths of light that go beyond

what our eyes can see. We call those false color images. And they can tell us about crop health. Those false color images have the ability to emphasize or highlight certain features of the Earth. And it's those aspects that really let us get a strong clue about crop health, crop progress, crop condition. And we can train computers to recognize those patterns and then produce maps that show the different types of land cover or the different types of vegetation on the surface of the earth. And you start combining multiple images of the same area taken over time, then you can analyze how those patterns are changing over the time and infer even more information about the

surface of the earth. So it's that digital imagery that we can piece together and overlay from back in time with the current date to give us an idea how things have changed in terms of where crops are being grown, if the crop health is better this year than it was last year or 10 years ago. And that record of information helps us keep track of the Earth's changes. We can see a lot from Lansat data. And we can make music with it too. Let's take a listen to what a long record of Lansat data might

sound like. You hear that? The high-pitched strings plucked periodically indicate the acres of land where six of the world's major crops are grown. Those are corn, soybeans, wheat, alfalfa, cotton, sorghum. The higher the pitch, the more acreage, Lansat recorded. Every slap of the guitar is a year, starting in 1995. Let's listen again with that in mind. What you just heard is called data sonification, music driven by data, like a chart for your ears. Listening to data helps us think about it in new ways. Like in this one, you can hear the acreage growing as the pitch of the guitar strings gets higher. Now we can look at decades of information on crop health with accuracy, but that wasn't always the case.

The Lansat program's early technology paved the way for that possibility. Lansat was digital way before most of us knew what a digital camera was, so it really was ahead of its time. There's a lot we can tell from Lansat data and imagery today, but the program had humble beginnings. It took a few visionaries, like Valerie, to set the groundwork. I got on Lansat in 1970. The first Lansat was,

launched in 1972. So I got in on that project at a very early stage. During that time to write programs, you had to be either mathematician, engineer, or scientists. It turns out during that time,

there were no computers at people's desk. The computer was in another building. They had key punch machine because we were still doing key punch. These various apps and operations and other kinds of things that people use now.

Back in those days, Lansad scenes were analyzed almost one at a time. Some of it was computerized analysis, but it was slow. Daily, a mounting volume of imagery going to a long list of subscribers at universities and research agencies, as well as individuals around the world, providing us with a more complete view of that world than we've ever had before. When I first started working with Lancet data, we'd print out information on an alphanumeric printer. Man began the first comprehensive inventory of his earthly resources, and he launched a valuable new means of obtaining information needed to manage those resources for his future well-being.

We'd hang those printouts on a wall and sometimes color them in with magic marker or color them pencils. A new chapter in space is in fact a new chapter in man's effort to prove himself worthy of his earthly heritage. When I got back to Penn State, I was really ahead of the game of what would watch a single image drop into a television display, like one line of pixels at a time. And then I would work at night and turn off the lights so I could record those maps on a film camera and then tape them into my thesis. It took a while for the infrastructure, for computing, to catch up to that. But with the, really the foresight those minds and engineers had in the past, the historical data

is very important also because we need to look in the past to get an idea of what's happening in the current day for understanding if something really is an anomaly or not. Thanks to that long record of data, we can see things like spikes and anomalies. We can track changes over time. And we can ensure there's not another great grain robbery. Because we can track how our crop health and supply are changing over time. Eight Lansat satellites have been launched since 1972, and NASA plans to launch a new one in the fall of 2021, Lansat 9,

which will continue Lansett's legacy and contributions to us here on Earth. The technology has just grown over my career in ways that I had never imagined, but I think some of the people who began the Lansat program back in the 60s, maybe they were more prescient than I ever was and kind of envisioned the growth of the program, the growth of the technology as it is today. This is NASA's Curious Universe. The Curious Universe team includes Klaus Meyer, Michaela Sosby, Margo Wall, and Vicki Woodburn.

Our executive producer is Katie Atkinson. Special thanks to Rylent Heggy, System Sounds, Mike Vellee, and the Lansat team. If you liked this episode, please let us know by leaving us a review, tweeting about the show at NASA and sharing us with a friend. The project was excellent. When I was going through it, I felt like the female version of Superman, able to jump over tall buildings and a single bounce

and faster than a speeding bullet. That's what I felt like. Still curious about NASA? You can send us questions about this episode or a previous one, and we'll try to track down the answers. You can email a voice recording or send a written note to NASA-curious Universe at mail.nassah.gov. Go to nassah.gov slash curiousuniverse for more information.