The image marks the end of an era.
The satellite image of Las Vegas was acquired on May 28th, 2024,
and it marks one of the last images collected by Landsat 7.
Using the shortwave infrared, near-infrared, and red bands,
the image offers a vivid depiction of the desert
landscape and urban expansion.
It was taken after the conclusion of the satellite's
science mission and commemorates its 25th anniversary.
This final snapshot serves as a meaningful tribute to Landsat 7's
long-standing contribution to Earth observation.
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Eyes on Earth,
a podcast produced at the USGS EROS Center.
Our podcast focuses on our ever changing planet and on the people here
at EROS and across the globe,
who use remote sensing to monitor and study the health of Earth.
My name is Tom Adamson.
Whenever we talk about Landsat, we mention the myriad ways
it helps study land change, monitor crop health and forest health, assess
damage after natural disasters, and on and on.
And Landsat 7 contributed to all those things over 25 years of operation,
sending its data to the Landsat Ground Station, also known as LGS,
here at EROS.
Today, we're talking with some of the people who kept Landsat
7 flying to make sure it could keep doing its job.
Tammy Vajo is a KBR contractor
at Goddard Space Flight Center and member of the Flight Operations Team.
Tom Cooke, also a KBR contractor,
is the Lead Engineer for the Flight Operations Team. And Jim
Lacasse is the USGS EROS Landsat Ground Operations
Project Manager.
How long have you all worked on the Flight Operations Team for Landsat 7?
Let's start with Tom.
Yeah, I started on Landsat 7
in the summer of 1994, I believe.
So it's been--this is about my 30th year anniversary with Landsat 7.
So I was on about five years before launch.
How about you, Tammy?
I have been on Landsat 7 for 26 years.
I came on a year prior to launch, and I've been here ever since.
How about Jim?
When did you start with Landsat 7?
Yeah, I have been working with Landsat
7 on and off since the fall of 2003.
And that's why I guess I'd like to make the point, too,
that I'm the government guy sitting here right now.
But there have been a host of people that have been
sitting in the role of government oversight of the project.
Okay. You're kind of representing that group for us.
Exactly. Sounds good.
Whenever we consider a spacecraft
that operated this long, there are going to be some big numbers.
For example, Landsat 7 acquired over 3.3 million scenes
and it went around the Earth over 133,000 times.
Here's another interesting number 117,000 contacts taken.
So what does that mean? What is a contact?
A contact is when we talk to the spacecraft.
I'll give the example of the LGS ground station.
So we schedule times through that ground station
that we talk to the spacecraft whenever Landsat flies over.
And that's six times a day.
And we turn on our transmitters and send data
down to the LGS ground station, and we send commands back through.
So 117,000 plus, because it's been more than that,
contacts are-- that's the number of times that we've actually talked
to Landsat 7, sent commands to it and received telemetry from it.
Yeah, we do that through a host of ground sites,
like Tammy said, LGS is one of our prime sites, but we also use sites
as far away as McMurdo, Antarctica, Australia, Alaska, Australia, Norway,
Wallops Island, Virginia,
and the NASA communications network that they keep in space.
They have comm satellites that--
a whole fleet of them-- that we also use for contacts.
And the contacts can range anywhere from 5 to 12 to 15 minutes long.
Okay.
And this is anything from telemetry data,
sending commands to the satellite, and collecting imagery.
Does that count too?
Yes, it absolutely counts.
Another interesting stat that we have is that the flight ops
team conducted 253 maneuvers on Landsat 7.
What type of maneuvers make up the majority of that number?
So, yeah, the vast majority of those burns
are us counteracting the effects of drag on the orbit.
You wouldn't
intuitively think that, but even 700 km up, there is a little bit
of atmospheric drag, a very, very tiny bit, and it slows us down.
And so every once in a while, to maintain our height properly
and have our orbital period be the same, we need to counteract
that drag and boost the satellite's orbit up just a little bit.
Sometimes it's a few meters, sometimes it's
tens of meters, but that's the majority of them.
There are other burns that we do, maybe a little bit more than a dozen
or so that are done specifically to get out of the way of debris.
But the vast majority of the burns
that we've done in the past have been drag makeup maneuvers.
So we always have to steer clear of space junk.
Maybe that's not the right word to use.
Is it orbital debris or space junk?
Technically, it's orbital debris, but it's--if it's coming
at us, we consider it junk.
Sounds good.
Yeah, it's anything, that can be anything from old pieces
of launch vehicles to broken up satellites to whatever. They can be
small, big.
It's a whole host of different things, and we're monitoring that all the time.
And we've had, since we started monitoring that in 2010,
we've had over 800 instances that we would consider
as high interest events, and we would monitor those.
And if the probability of a collision with Landsat 7 got to a certain point
and the timing was right, we would physically move
the satellite, change the orbit, just to get out of the way of the debris.
That's only happened a dozen or two times, since we started.
But like I said, we've had over 800 individual events that we've monitored
over the years that, that were potential risks to the satellite.
Did you have any days or moments that really got your heart pumping, like,
wow, that was close.
We almost went off the road there. Yes.
Yeah. An unfortunate number.
Yes, we have. Oh, no.
There are things that we do
that we plan and prepare for, but when something breaks,
we get a page in the middle of the night that something isn't as it should be.
That's what gets our heart pumping.
And I know for me, in January of 2024 of this year
was one that sticks out in my mind.
The orbit has changed enough that the spacecraft no longer went into shadow.
And because of that, the spacecraft sat in full sun the whole time.
And so things heated up, including the batteries,
and the batteries have set at two degrees for 25 years.
That's what they're designed to do.
And then all of a sudden they shoot up to ten degrees.
And that was nerve wracking.
But we had plans in place. We were prepared.
We knew that might happen, and we had things in place
to counteract that and and bring the battery temperatures back down.
And the spacecraft reacted like a champ to everything.
It didn't seem to mind anything. It was the team that
got really nervous.
Yeah, Tammy brings up a good point that, a lot of the work that we do is,
as the offline engineers at least,
is trying to prepare for things we think might happen.
And in this case, we knew the shadow was going away.
So those burns and I mentioned earlier that we use to make up for the drag,
we've stopped doing
those because, a lack of fuel and we've stopped maintaining the orbit,
and the orbit is drifting as it has been for years now.
And as a consequence, like Tammy mentioned, in January, for the first time
ever in the quarter century that Landsat 7 had been flying,
it did not dip behind the earth and get a shadow on its orbit.
It was in full sun, 24 hours a day.
And that was, that was a new paradigm for us.
And we had prepared and gotten things together, and we had in our head
what might work.
We had procedures ready and all that.
But to see it happening,
actually happening and seeing how the spacecraft was interacting was,
was certainly-- it's unsettling because the the consistency
that we had gotten to know over the previous quarter century was now gone.
But the things that really, I
agree with Tammy,
the things that really get my heart going are, we'll get a page in the middle of
night, 2, 3, or 4 in the morning on a, on any given night, and something's wrong,
and that drive into work.
You know, we're like firefighters sleeping in your bunk,
and the bell goes off, and we start heading into work.
I remember specifically for myself, I remember a time in 20--
I think was the year rollover in 2001.
The spacecraft does not know really what year it is and we have to, it
doesn't have a GPS or anything on board, so we have to tell it--
We have to be there for every New Year's Eve.
We've worked every new Year's Eve for the last 25 years,
and we have to sort of shepherd the spacecraft into the new year.
And that requires some complex commanding and parameters that are specifically
tuned to that specific second for that day, for that year.
And that year, rollover did not go well, and the spacecraft lost control.
And the solar array, which usually rotates to follow
the sun, was rotating backwards.
And the spacecraft was angry that night and she let us know about it.
I looked up and we were in a contact at the time watching this happen live,
and I looked up and we had three minutes left in the contact before we were going
to lose contact with the spacecraft for at least another hour or two,
and we knew that it was out of control and it was losing the sun.
And we had, collectively as a group,
I think there were 5 or 6 of us there
that night, we had 180 seconds to figure out what was going down,
what was the biggest risk to the spacecraft, and what can we do
to save this before it got extremely serious.
That gets my heart pumping
just thinking about that now.
Suffice it to say, we figured it out.
The spacecraft didn't know what year it was,
and you had to help it sort of turn over the calendar to a new year?
Yeah, that's an operation we have to do every year on New Year's Eve.
We have a half second interval that we have to get several commands
in and update new parameters to readjust the
baseline year that the satellite's using all of its timing on.
And they have to be done just right.
And the values have to be just right.
We don't just tell it's 2024.
It's a very modified Julian date.
So it's a big number that you have to convert down
into binary and get that up on board, patch the flight software.
In a way, you're kind of changing the tire
on the car while you're going down the road,
and you have to do it just right, or things go sideways on you.
That year, things went sideways on us, but that's been the only one.
Every other one of those operations has been pretty smooth.
Although like I said, we end up working every New Year's Eve, so--
But that's the nature of the beast.
That's the job we signed up for.
We've had people in the control center doing operations every Christmas
and Thanksgiving and everybody's birthday, and the spacecraft
doesn't care about those things.
It just needs to be taken care of.
So, Jim, is that-- can you talk about if that's an issue with other Landsats?
No, that's
one of the things I was going to say with this mission is it's interesting:
something that's been flying this long,
and I think you can go back to Landsat 5 and say the same thing,
technology's progressed, the operations concept, it's progressed.
And they learn from every mission to, you know, add new features
and new autonomy and, you know, you have higher processing powers.
One of the development mantras is test as you fly, fly as you test.
And so you try to not do anything on orbit that you haven't done on the ground.
Well, when a spacecraft's been flying this long, you get into situations
where the flight operations team has to reach into their creativity bag
and figure out how to do things that it was not designed to do.
There are things that, with Landsat 7 that you won't see
with Landsat 8 and 9, because the design is different now.
So my hat's off to the flight operations team.
They're working with tools they weren't given in the beginning,
that they've come up with.
So kudos to you guys.
And, you know, recognizing the flight operations team through the years.
I want to go back to one other type of maneuver.
There's also an inclination maneuver.
And the last one of those happened in February 2017.
Can one of you describe real quick what's an inclination maneuver, why
that's necessary, and why there were no more of those after February 2017?
Yeah.
So, the inclination is referring to the inclination of the spacecraft's orbit.
And that's the angle between the orbit plane that we operate in
and the Earth's equator. During our primary science mission,
that was very, very tightly controlled, because through a bunch of physics
and orbital dynamics, that angle is how we maintain our mean local time.
And the mean local time is important because that keeps the sun
angle at a very consistent value when we take an image.
So when we cross over the equator, we want the sun to be at a certain
range of angles over whatever target we're imaging
so that it's a consistent lighting conditions from image to image.
And so to control that angle and that mean local time,
we have to control the orbit's inclination very, very tightly.
It was pretty much every year for the, for the first, 18 years, really,
that we did a slight inclination maintenance maneuver.
And we're talking about adjusting that angle by a fraction of a degree.
But that makes all the difference in the world.
And so in 2017,
what happened was, we had a requirement that we were going to lower our orbit
when the mission was complete,
or before we declared the mission complete,
we were supposed to lower the orbit 8 kilometers just to get out of the way
of the other constellation members that we were flying with at the time.
And to do that, you have to reserve a certain amount of fuel
to be able to do that operation later on in your life.
And so when we got to 2017,
the thing about inclination burns is they're very expensive fuel-wise.
You have to spend a great amount of fuel to change your inclination just the tiniest bit.
And so, 2017, it was determined that that was going to be the last time
we were going to be able to spend that much fuel to maintain the inclination.
And after that point, we were going to let the inclination drift.
And so the consequences of that were,
so the inclination went up a little bit, and then it started drifting down.
And in 2018, the inclination was back to where it was around--
when it was in 2017 when we did our last burn.
And then it continued to drift down,
which is something we hadn't let it do prior to that.
So that mean local time started drifting and it started drifting lower and lower.
And we were originally at 10:15 a.m.
at that time when we did our 2017 burn.
And by the time, I think it was 2021, our inclination had drifted enough
and the mean local time had drifted down to 9:15,
which was the sort of the outer edge, the lower edge of our operational box.
And at that time, USGS determined that the sun would, you know, we told them
the sun was definitely outside of the 9:15 to 10, 9:45 to 10:15 box.
And images were still being used.
And the USGS made the determination that we should continue imaging,
even though the mean local time had drifted beyond that.
And we continued imaging up until January of 2024.
So that time that you're talking about, 10:15,
that's the time that the spacecraft crosses the equator? Right.
So that's the sort of a theoretical, if you were standing on the equator
when we passed overhead, the sun would be around where it is at 10:15 a.m.
in the morning.
Okay. Gotcha.
And that's helping with consistent imagery,
which of course is a big deal with Landsat.
Exactly.
Now, the New Year's Eve thing that you have to do, that
didn't have anything to do with Y2K, did it? No.
That was a completely separate issue.
And because we launched in '99, the developers of our ground system,
that was in the forefront of their mind when they were developing the system
and the spacecraft as well.
Although since the spacecraft doesn't know what year it
is, that's actually a bonus at the at the 2K rollover.
But we ended up not having any issues in the, in our control center for that.
Early on in the Landsat 7 mission, the Scan Line
Corrector, a mechanism inside the ETM+ sensor, failed.
We're going to turn now to Pat Scaramuzza and Jon
Christopherson, who were at EROS when that happened.
Pat was an image assessment system analyst on the calibration/validation team,
and Jon was a principal systems engineer.
Can you explain
what is a Scan Line Corrector and what does it do?
Landsat 7 is what they call whiskbroom sensor.
So there's an actual motor inside the instrument
that spins the mirrors back and forth, and they've got bumpers
and that just bumps off the side and goes back and forth like a whiskbroom.
Imagine you're in a pickup,
you know, sitting on the tail of a pickup with a garden hose.
If you're driving along the road at 15 or 20 miles an hour
and just going back and forth and back and forth with that,
that's not going to look like parallel lines of water on the road.
That's going to look like a zigzag pattern. Because you're moving forward.
Right.
And so what the Scan Line Corrector is, is a--
what's called a forward motion compensator.
It compensates for that forward motion
by pushing the deal forward at the beginning
and then pulling it back as you go, so that you're counteracting
the forward motion of the vehicle, of the satellite,
and getting parallel scans on the ground, which then make a nice, pretty picture.
It's a complicated mechanism.
It's a marvel of '70s engineering and '80s engineering
when they first put the first ones together for Landsats 4 and 5.
They had all functioned wonderfully
all these years.
And then one morning, actually, a user called in and said, this imagery--
something's wrong with it. And alerted our crew.
And they immediately noticed,
that's got to be the Scan Line Corrector
that's wrong, because we're now seeing the same thing
at the edges of the scan, because it's no longer
moving that image to compensate for that motion.
You saw some, like, repeated pixels in the scan? Exactly.
Okay. So they're repeated at the edges and they're perfect in the middle.
And then there's a big gap between each one of them, that zigzag pattern.
So that's what we were seeing.
What did you and the other engineers have to do at that point?
So it's obviously it was a geometry problem. One, we didn't know what--we didn't know
it was the Scan Line Corrector at first.
So Ron Hayes and Jim Storey were the geometry people
at the time, and they, you know, tried to see what the data was doing,
why it was happening.
Meanwhile, we were
looking for the start of the problem because it suddenly appeared. One day,
the instrument was fine, the next day it wasn't.
And we eventually found that scene.
I think it's in Alaska, where it's fine
at the top of the scan, then the scans go a little bit crazy,
and at the end it's got the Scan Line Corrector gaps in it.
You're trying to troubleshoot a satellite 438 miles in space
where you can't touch it.
You can't see it, you can't,
you know, open it up, grab measurements. You can't whack it upside the head.
You know, you can't deal with it.
So it's all very painstaking.
But we had what is called the engineering model of the original ETM,
or the original Thematic Mapper, built back in the 1980s, late '70s, early '80s.
That was a fully functioning thematic mapper sensor, but was meant
for testing on the ground, purely meant to show that, yep, we can build one
and this is how it works, and it works.
Then we'll build the space qualified one and get it, you know, up in orbit.
But that engineering model
ended up being out in EROS's lobby
as a display piece, you know, for people to look at.
It's all covered in shiny gold foil.
And it looks interesting. It looks really cool. Yeah.
And I asked, you know, isn't it possible that it could be inside the
engineering model?
They said, no, no, no, it's not there.
And that bugged me.
So after the meeting we were in there, I grabbed a digital camera.
Digital cameras are still pretty new
at the time. We didn't have them on our cell phones and stuff.
This was 2003.
Yeah, right. This is the old days.
But I grabbed a digital camera,
and I stuck my arm way up inside
the telescope and took a picture down there.
Sure enough, there was a Scan Line Corrector in there, and,
sent the pictures off to California and to NASA, and they're, like,
well, there it is.
And so plans were made to ship a couple of engineers
from Santa Barbara out to help crack the ETM+ open.
You have to break it in half almost, and then remove the Scan Line Corrector,
send it back to Santa Barbara for analysis.
And they had some of the original
test equipment that could be power it up correctly and so on.
And they did further tests, and
they couldn't make it break.
We have no idea what caused the Scan Line Corrector to fail
because it is, it's way out in space.
We can't go see, we can't open it up and find out.
We can surmise or guess, and
some of the best guesses are that maybe something broke, or a piece of something
got in there and jammed it up, or -- Yeah, that's our best guess.
There is a motor there and there's a shaft.
It looks like that shaft broke.
And it just could not get the motor to move the mirror at all.
And they tried many different things before they finally,
over a period of months, arrived at the formal conclusion that it's broke.
We kind of knew that months earlier, but
like I say, we always hold out hope.
What was the flight ops team
doing on 9/11? For myself, I remember coming in to work
and listening on the radio as the planes hit the Twin Towers,
and when I got into work, I was told to just go home.
So I turned around and went right home.
There were several members of the team, though, that had to stay.
There's critical commanding that needs done every single day.
So they got that commanding done.
And then then they all went home, too. Goddard closed
at that point. I think all NASA facilities closed.
Even though it was closed,
we are essential personnel so we can get on base and we needed to.
So we continued to come in.
Somebody continued to come in every day
after 9/11 to take care of the spacecraft, to make sure it was okay,
and to do the critical commanding that it needed every day.
Basically all government facilities closed for non-essential work.
So we had the same thing.
And I guess one point, you know,
Tammy, you were talking about the commandings necessary.
And that included imagery continued as well.
And so Landsat 7 did end up, capturing, you know, post
impact images that showed smoke coming off of New York.
Yeah, that's the critical work Tammy was talking about.
We had to be in the control center
to make sure that that command load was up,
because we knew we were overflying Ground Zero the next day.
So we wanted to make sure we got that. When there's a blizzard
or severe weather, someone always has to be on duty anyway, right?
Yes. Like we've mentioned,
every single day, every single year, somebody has to be in the control center.
So, we monitor the weather in the wintertime.
And if we see a storm coming, well, and we decide who's going to stay,
and we have people that stay overnight in the control center,
that way you don't have to worry about coming and going and traveling.
And we bring in sleeping bags and everybody brings in food for them.
There are people that that stay the night. The January
of 2024 incident that I mentioned when we went into full sun,
we got a page in the middle of the night, and it was the first snow
that we had had in like 800 days, and it was a significant snow.
And I'm driving in at like three in the morning
and you can't see the road, you can't see anything.
But we got a page and and we had to get here and thankfully everybody,
everybody did. We all got here safely.
And then that that goes to the Covid thing as well,
right, Tammy? That's the same thing.
There was a global pandemic. The spacecraft doesn't care.
And so people have to show up every day
and do the necessary operations that have to happen every day.
And so there was a core group of people that had to make sure
that those operations got completed every single day.
And, a quarter century when the flight ops
team has had somebody in the control center every day.
Since launch in this area, we've had multiple hurricanes,
several blizzards with, you know, multiple feet of snow.
We've had an earthquake, tornadoes, the global pandemic,
9/11, all kinds of stuff.
Are there any other memories that any of you would like to share?
There was an incident back in, and I had looked this up, back in 2005,
where a U.S. submarine collided with a seamount southeast of Guam,
and we got a call, actually, asking
about, you know, what Landsat 7 can see in the water.
And we were requested--
I don't know if you recall this, Tom and Tammy,
but we were requested to take images out just in the open ocean.
And that was kind of, you know, we just hadn't done that before, and it worked.
And we actually expanded our coastal imaging after that.
And, you know, that's just become part and a big part now.
And matter of fact, they're adding bands and stuff to Landsat
Next, you know, looking at the water and stuff.
So it's kind of interesting how the mission has expanded
into areas that weren't thought of back in the day 25 years ago.
That might be part of the reason that there's something like 750 images
per day now taken from each Landsat 8 and 9, and Landsat
Next will have a huge load of data, too, because we're expanding the coastal areas.
One of my specific core memories of
of the past 30 years is launch day for Landsat 7.
I was the flight controller there that day, and I was on for the launch shift.
And my daughter had been born that week.
So it was a very, very busy week for me.
No sleep at all.
It was a very nervous time, not just because you have this satellite
that, you know, we had all worked on for a few years
prior to that already, and we'd gone up to Valley Forge where it was built
and helped them test it in the thermal vac chamber and done about all,
you know, just you've invested years of your life already at that point
in this mission, and now you see it sitting on top of this rocket.
And it was a very, very tense day.
But on top of all of that, we were racing to fill a gap
that was left by the the launch failure of Landsat 6.
And there was a lot of consternation in the
community that there was going to be a gap in Landsat data.
And that's, you know, there's a string of unbroken
data going into the archive all the way back to Landsat 1.
And so there was a lot of pressure on this going
well and working properly.
And I remember standing there behind the controllers getting ready for launch.
And of course, we're not in control at that point.
You're on the launch vehicle and the countdown is going down.
And if I'm not mistaken, I think our first contact was blown.
We didn't get that. So that was a little bit nerve wracking.
And the room is full of people from, the builder,
the team, everybody was in there.
And just trying to handle the whole room and keep everybody quiet
and not to get too excited because, you know,
there's just a lot, a lot of emotions going on.
And, of course, I was operating on zero sleep that week because of my newborn,
but that was, 20-whatever, 25, 26 years ago now.
Tammy, any other memories that you would like to share?
There's 25 years worth of memories
in my head.
So launch day was a big memory for me, too.
And I'll put a slightly different spin on it.
Tom's right.
We had the spacecraft builder there, and managers and NASA,
and everybody was there, and it was tense, but it went well.
And I happened to be wearing an orange Landsat shirt that day.
And because launch went well,
we attributed that to the fact of I was wearing an orange shirt.
So that's called the lucky shirt.
So now everybody on the team has an orange Landsat shirt.
And whenever we do any unusual commanding
or have an anomaly, we all show up wearing an orange shirt for luck.
And that was something that happened on launch day.
I'm glad to know that engineers aren't superstitious or anything.
Every little bit helps.
Yeah. We're not saying that's why
things worked,
but we're not willing to chance it either.
Jim, I'll give you a chance for any other memories.
I just think of the legacy of Landsat 7,
of how many people it's been their career,
or how many people that it's been, you know, steppingstone in their career.
And that includes, you know, not only, the folks sitting here that we represent,
but also the internationals, because there's the international aspect to this,
and the data that's been downlinked, and it's a little bit different going back
because with a smaller recorder,
data had to be downlinked to the ground.
And now
we spent years getting that data back through another project.
But, again, it's just the memory of the breadth of this program,
the people that have participated in it, and the benefit that
it's done over these 25 years for the entire world.
We were the first program to--
that's when USGS decided to give the data away for free,
right?
And the I think the user community expanded exponentially.
Yeah, I was going to note that, too, that it was Landsat 7 when,
you know, we changed over to no charge
and we saw the rapid expansion of the use of the data.
If you had to summarize Landsat 7's mission
and legacy in, say, 30 seconds.
From the flight ops team perspective, most of us have been around since launch.
And because of that, we have established relationships
with so many other groups
and companies and organizations around the world and around the country.
And that makes operating Landsat 7 easier.
Not easy, but easier, because if there's a problem
or a question or something, we know who to go to
to fix the problem or to troubleshoot and answer a question.
And because of that, we have a great mission and we are a part of that.
We keep the spacecraft healthy and producing as much science
as it possibly can, and downlinking all of those images into the archive.
And that's something that the team is extremely proud of.
Yeah,
that's a tough one for me because there's just so much,
you know, squeeze the last 30 years into 30 seconds.
But, there's a local legacy here.
That's the team, the teamwork that we've had and the collaboration
that it takes to keep this thing flying and keep it healthy
and out of harm's way and taking care of it and preparing it.
So many of us have been here for decades that we've seen,
you know, we've been around together.
It's kind of a different like, work family really.
And we've seen each other get married, have kids,
there's a couple divorces in there.
Some serious medical issues, like we've just shared so much,
amongst ourselves as a group.
And, we work so well together as a team.
And then there's the global legacy
of the Landsat 7 or the Landsat project in general
and, how proud we are to be a part of that and to be a bridge
between the Landsats before us and the Landsats that come after us.
It's a privilege to have worked on it. It really is.
Thank you to Pat Scaramuzza and Jon Christopherson
for sharing your insights on the Scan Line Corrector situation.
And to Tammy Vajo, Tom Cooke, and Jim Lacasse for sharing your thoughts and experiences
about your time on the Landsat 7 Flight Operations Team.
Check out our social media accounts to watch for all future episodes.
You can also subscribe to us on Apple and YouTube
Podcasts.
This podcast, this podcast, this podcast, this podcast,
this podcast is a product of the U.S. Geological Survey,
Department of Interior.
I have to add a quick did you know fact.
Landsat 7 is an artist.
Landsat 7 imagery was the inspiration for the first Earth As Art collection.
Yeah, I remember when they started that. They're beautiful images.
Yeah.
And you can hear more about that on Eyes on Earth Episode 97.