Dang, hits home. When I was a senior in high school, I was lucky to able to volunteer under Dr. Eric Brown De Colstoun at NASA Goddard, checking error rates for tree cover estimates using Landsat data^. Many hours that fall spent trudging around parks and forests, looking at the sky through a PVC pipe. It still kind of blows my mind at how much is able to be gained from images where each pixel is 15mx15m of ground-level area (and, I believe, with an important component of Landsat 7's imaging system broken for most of its lifespan).

I also wasn't aware that Landsat program imagery had been made free to access a few years later. Nice.

^(A massive thank you to him, since I wouldn't have graduated without being able to participate in that project. And a massive apology for going on to get a fine arts degree.)

It seems like a lot of these government-owned space things last a lot longer than they're made for. There's Landsat, Spirit, Opportunity, Hubble, the Voyagers, et cetera. It seems to be a pretty steep curve - either they fail on launch or landing or very early, or they far outlast expectations. There seems to be little that meets expectations. I can see lots of failures - space stuff is hard - but why so many things exceeding it?

In the Las Vegas slider, the Lake Mead before/after difference is startling.

History of Landsat is very interesting https://www.space.com/19665-landsat.html

A lot of my undergrad and grad school involved using ETM+ imagery. Gosh does that sink in how long ago that was.

Life expectancy is statistical probability

The mission targets a length of time, then the engineering matches for the design and build

Reality is usually much longer

I can't seem to find a reason for shutting it down in the article. Does anyone have info on this? Was it for budget reasons or was their a failure on orbit?

perhaps the most important news to me here is that landsat 9 was launched in 02021. landsat 8 is also still alive and kicking!

Frightening how much smaller Lake Mead is now.

> How long does Lake Mead have left? Lake Mead has been facing a water crisis for many years. The water level in the lake has been dropping due to the increasing demand for water and the decreasing supply. If the trend continues, the lake could run out of water in the next 10 to 15 years.

Great…I was in Vegas last weekend, I guess they’ll just run it until it’s dry. Humans are ridiculous.

Amazing what a rounding error in the federal budget can do for humanity. More please.

The two different pictures of Las Vegas in 1999 and 2024 shows the environmental tragedy unfolding: the city doubled in size, and Lake Mead shrank.

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did somebody pop its balloon?

nasa running low on helium?