Eyes on Earth: EROS

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Episode 94 – EROS 50^th: Collaborations with SDSU

Sources/Usage: Public Domain.

South Dakota State University opened its Remote Sensing Institute even before the launch of Landsat 1 and the selection of South Dakota as the location for EROS. In this episode of Eyes on Earth, we talk about some of the collaborations that SDSU and EROS have both benefited from, including research projects centered on Landsat and other data sources, instrument calibration and validation, and trainings, presentations and workshops. SDSU faculty and EROS staff have ventured back and forth, and SDSU students have worked as interns and found employment at EROS. 

Guests: Mary O’Neill, former program manager of SDSU’s Office of Remote Sensing and outgoing AmericaView board director, and Dennis Helder, founder of SDSU’s Image Processing Lab, former head of the Electrical Engineering Department and current part-time technical adviser and contractor at EROS

Host: Jane Lawson (contractor for USGS EROS)

Producer: Tom Adamson (contractor for USGS EROS)

Release date: Wednesday, May 24, 2023

Episode 93 – EROS 50^th: Film Scanning

Sources/Usage: Public Domain.

Working with film has always been part of EROS’ 50-year history. How did EROS end up with an extensive film archive, and how are we making that data available to users? In this episode, we talk about the custom scanners built in-house from discarded parts to digitally capture historical aerial photos and declassified spy satellite images. These Phoenix systems have scanned millions of images and still have a lot of work to do.

Guests: Tim Smith and Mike Austad (contractors for USGS EROS)

Host: Tom Adamson (contractor for USGS EROS)

Release date: Monday, April 3, 2023

Episode 92 – EROS 50th: The Library and Science Support

Sources/Usage: Public Domain.

The Don Lee Kulow Library has been supporting scientific research at EROS since before the facility opened its doors in 1973. In this episode, librarian Carol Deering explains how, rather than becoming obsolete with the advent of instant access to online journals, libraries are even more crucial for the discovery of previous studies and for gauging the reach and real-world effects of research done by EROS scientists. She also talks about the history of EROS and describes a one-time quest for documents that stretched from UC Berkeley to the Library of Congress to Australia and Kenya.

Guest: Carol Deering, Librarian at the Don Lee Kulow Memorial Library at USGS EROS

Host: Sheri Levisay

Release date: Monday, March 20, 2023

Episode 91 – Intro to AmericaView

Sources/Usage: Public Domain.

AmericaView aims to advance Earth observation education through a network of programs based at universities in more than 40 states. In this episode, we talk about AmericaView’s goals and how AmericaView and its member states explain remote sensing efforts to society in a variety of ways, including outreach to students who range from elementary to graduate school. We also give examples of the organization’s remote sensing research and describe AmericaView’s ties with the USGS and with Landsat.

Guests: Chris McGinty, Executive Director of AmericaView; Lisa Wirth, Program Director of AmericaView; Sal Cook, USGS Program Liaison for the AmericaView Grant; J.C. Seong, Principal Investigator of GeorgiaView

Host: Jane Lawson

Release date: Monday, March 6, 2023

Episode 89 – EROS Workers and Weather

Sources/Usage: Public Domain.

In this episode, we take a look at how essential employees ensure that the ground station keeps receiving satellite imagery during wintry weather. When the snow gets deep and the wind blows, it can be challenging for workers to travel to the USGS EROS Center, located several miles north of Sioux Falls, SD, on what used to be farmland. Most can telecommute these days, but in this episode, we discover how essential employees ensure there is in-person continuous monitoring of Landsat ground station operations during winter weather—sometimes even requiring an overnight stay.

Guests: Joe Blahovec, chief of the Satellite and Ground Systems Operations Branch (SGO), and Aaron Hensley, ground station shiftlead, Critical Mission Support Staff, KBR

Host: Sheri Levisay

Release date: Monday, February 6, 2023

Episode 81 – Tour of the EROS Radome

Sources/Usage: Public Domain.

In this episode, we take a tour of a crucial component of the Landsat data acquisition process at EROS: the radome that houses the 10-meter antenna for downlinking data to be placed in the archive. The Landsat satellites have been collecting Earth imagery for more than 50 years. A key piece of equipment that moves the data from the spacecraft to the archive so researchers can use it is the antenna at the EROS Center. The antenna and its radome have a fascinating history of their own that adds to the overall Landsat story. In this episode, we go on location to learn about how the antenna works and how the ground station engineers at EROS make it possible to study land change with Landsat.

Guest: Mike O’Brien, contractor and ground station engineer, USGS EROS Center

Host: Tom Adamson

Release date: Wednesday, October 12, 2022

Episode 79 – Landsat Global Archive Consolidation 

Sources/Usage: Public Domain.

In this episode, we learn about the process that has gradually added millions of earlier Landsat scenes to the 50-year archive. The Landsat archive at EROS contains an unparalleled 50 years of Earth observation data. But with earlier technologies, some Landsat scenes were collected and stored only by international ground receiving stations rather than in the central archive at EROS. More than 10 years ago, to help make that far-flung data available to scientists interested in land change over time, the Landsat Global Archive Consolidation (LGAC) project began having the reels and tapes sent to EROS to digitize that information. In this episode of Eyes on Earth, we learn how that project has deepened the archive dramatically.

Guests: Todd Taylor, EROS contract task lead for Sustaining Land Imaging partnership support, and contractor Jayson Holter, EROS task manager for the Landsat Missions Operations Project, Ground Operations

Host: Tom Adamson

Producer: Brian Hauge

Release date: August 29, 2022

Episode 11 – EROS Fall Poster Session

Sources/Usage: Public Domain.

In this episode, we hear from a few of the scientists on hand for the EROS Fall Poster Session. Each fall, EROS invites its staff scientists and area graduate students to visit for a noontime poster session. The poster sessions offer a change for those researchers to present their results to their peers and get feedback from their fellow scientists. For this episode, we’ll hear about research into biofuels, cloud-friendly Landsat data, shrubland mapping and satellite-based fire monitoring.

Guests: Dr. Sanath Kumar Sathyachandran, Matthew Rigge, Renee Pischke, contractors to USGS EROS; Logan Megard, South Dakota State University

Host: John Hult

Release date: Dec. 5, 2019