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Geoinformatics_01-2009
event fig. 2a the nasa ikhana uav, which is a modified predator-b unmanned aircraft, is shown in flight. fig. 2b the nasa ikhana uav is being checked out on the ground note the underwing pod which houses the imager. 2011 at the very earliest before it can be launched and brought into service. furthermore a commitment to building another satellite in the series needs to be made soon if data continuity is to be assured for the future. general session v, which also acted as the closing session of the symposium on 20th november, had the title entering a new landsat era the future is now . in this respect, it had already been preceded by two technical sessions on the ldcm, each comprising four papers, that had been held on 18th november. these gave very detailed information about the satellite which is due to be called landsat-8 after it has been launched. the contract for the construction of the satellite platform has been awarded to general dynamics advanced information systems; the operational land imager (oli) is already being built by ball aerospace; the atlas-5 launcher will be supplied by the united launch alliance (of lockheed + boeing); while the contract for the mission operational element (moe) has been awarded to the hammers company based in greenbelt, maryland. nasa is responsible for the provision of the spacecraft, imager, launch vehicle and support services using these contractors. the usgs will then take over the operation of the satellite after its successful launch and checkout. thus usgs is providing the mission operations centre and ground processing systems, as well as the flight operations team. will need to be eliminated during the image processing operations that will be carried out by the ground processing system. compared with the etm+ imager on the previous landsat-7 satellite, the oli imager will feature two additional spectral channels [fig. 1 (e)]. the first is an ultra-blue band centred at 443 nanometres for use in coastal and aerosol studies, while the second is a band centred at 1,375 nanometres in the short-wave infra-red (swir) that is intended for cirrus cloud detection. at the present time, no thermal-ir bands will be acquired during the mission. fig. 2c the autonomous modular scanner (ams) thermal-ir imager is being loaded into the under-wing pod prior to being mounted on the wing of the ikhana uav. of special interest to the audience were the details of the oli imager [fig. 1 (a) & (b)] all the previous landsat missions had used an optical-mechanical whiskbroom scanner for the acquisition of their ground images. by contrast, unmanned aerial vehicles (uavs) the oli imager on the ldcm will be a pushbbesides the general and technical sessions on room line scanner. however, instead of this the ldcm, i also attended those on uavs. in using a set of parallel ccd linear arrays for the total, the various sessions on this particular acquisition of its multi-spectral imagery (as in subject area virtually constituted a special symthe spot and irs satellites), the oli will utilize posium on uavs within the overall pecora-17 two sets of focal plane arrays (fpas) which symposium since it continued as an overflow are essentially area arrays. since these arrays meeting or workshop that 58 of us attended at cannot be butted together to form a continuthe usgs facility in denver on the day (21st ous line, they are arranged in two banks, each november) after the main symposium at the of seven arrays, that are offset relative to one sheraton hotel had formally closed! in total, 13 another to ensure that a continuous swath image of the ground will be produced by the oli imager in the crosstrack direction [fig. 1 (c)]. this arrangement will result in some complications during the subsequent processing of the image data. in particular, when the individual images are merged together, a small parallax may be present between the images of specific ground objects that will be recorded by the two separate banks of fpas fig. 2d nasa engineers check out the planned flight paths prior to the take-off of [fig. 1 (d)]. this effect the ikhana uav on a fire monitoring mission in california. (source: nasa-dfrc). jan./feb. 2009 34
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