Eyes on Earth Episode 94 – EROS 50th: Collaborations with SDSU

MARY O'NEILL:

I just want to say a big thank you to EROS for all of your support and cooperation over the past 50 years or more. And I think that without that, geospatial technologies at SDSU would be much less robust than they are now, and students would probably be going elsewhere for their training and employment.

JANE LAWSON:

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Eyes on Earth, a podcast produced at the USGS EROS Center, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. Our podcast focuses on our ever-changing planet and on the people at EROS and across the globe who use remote sensing to monitor the health of Earth. My name is Jane Lawson, and I'll be hosting today's episode, where we're talking about some of the many collaborations South Dakota State University and EROS have enjoyed throughout that half-century. SDSU resides in Brookings, South Dakota, less than an hour away from EROS. SDSU faculty and EROS staff have ventured back and forth, and SDSU students have worked as interns at EROS and also found jobs here after graduation. SDSU had an early interest in remote sensing, opening its Remote Sensing Institute even before the launch of the first Landsat satellite and the selection of southeastern South Dakota as the site for EROS. Since then, SDSU has been involved in projects centered on Landsat and other data sources from studies exploring scientific benefits to support in instrument calibration and validation. The university's strong remote sensing program recently earned the rank of fifth best in the United States and 22nd best in the world. Our guests today are here to offer their perspective of the beneficial relationship SDSU and EROS have enjoyed. Mary O'Neill's work with the remote sensing department at SDSU dates back to 1972, just after she earned her bachelor's degree in mathematics. She later went on to earn her master's in geography from SDSU, and she retired in 2013. Dennis Helder earned his bachelor's and master's in electrical engineering from SDSU and a Ph.D. from NDSU. He worked for decades with remote sensing characterization and calibration at SDSU before retiring, and he helps EROS out a bit now. Dennis also has just been selected as a 2023 Distinguished Engineering Associate, so congratulations on that honor, Dennis!

DENNIS HELDER:

Thank you.

LAWSON:

And welcome, both of you, to Eyes on Earth. Let's start out with each of you sharing a bit about what your remote sensing work involved at SDSU. Mary, would you like to start?

O'NEILL:

Sure. Thank you, Jane. Well, as you mentioned earlier, I started working at SDSU in the Remote Sensing Institute way back in 1972, and they hired me as an image processing specialist, which I had no idea what that was at the time. I had never taken a remote sensing course. There weren't any to take, actually. And so it was very much a learning on the job kind of experience. As you said, my background is in math. And also I had a lot of computer programming experience, so that was very helpful, useful. That's probably why they ended up hiring me. So, much of my initial work involved digitizing and analyzing aerial film, which was the only thing available at that point, and thermal infrared data that was collected by instrumentation in our Remote Sensing Institute's aircraft, which we lovingly call Old Smokey. And then we also had imagery that was acquired by NASA that we analyzed as well. But of course, a lot of that changed after the first Landsat, or ERTS, as it was called then when it was launched back in 1972. And then most of the image processing work involved digitizing and analyzing the RBV and MSS film image products that resulted from ERTS 1 and then later processing the digital products from the various Landsat sensors. So, in general, I could say that my work at SDSU was exactly what a land grant university is supposed to do: research, education and outreach. So, I touched all three of those areas. Many of the research projects involved precision ag and environmental issues, such as water quality. And then in addition to working with remotely sensed data, geographic informations came along as another tool in our geospatial toolbox, as did GPS, and so I did a lot of work in those areas as well. I worked a lot with international projects, a lot of them funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. And that work involved training international scientists from around the world, usually from developing countries, often traveling to their countries to assist them with technology transfer workshops and supporting the scientists from RSI who lived and worked long term in those countries. In later years, I worked with programs funded by NASA and USGS that focused on K-12 education and outreach. So these included the Upper Midwest Aerospace Consortium, the South Dakota Space Grant Consortium, and most recently, AmericaView. And then I also taught some remote sensing and geographic information system courses as an adjunct instructor. So it was a variety.

LAWSON:

A busy life.

O'NEILL:

It was, but fun.

LAWSON:

Great. Dennis, do you want to go ahead and tell us a little about your background now?

HELDER:

Yeah. As you mentioned, I did quite a bit of my educational work at SDSU, but I ended up going to North Dakota State for my doctoral work. And I came back to SDSU and was looking for a dissertation topic. This was about 1988. I kind of actually knew a little bit about image processing because I found a textbook on it, but I never had a course in it, either, like Mary. And I thought, what can I do with images? So believe it or not, I went to Mary's office, and I said to her - You remember this? You were there that day. 

O'NEILL:

I do.

HELDER: 

I said to her, Do you know anybody at EROS I could talk to? And she gave me a name and a number of this lady to call named June Thormosgard, who was like a branch chief or a section leader at that time, well-known name in the industry then. And I called June up, cold phone call, absolutely cold. I hate making phone calls, and cold ones are the worst. And I call her up, and I literally, I said to her, "Are you interested in image processing? I am." That's about asbout as far as I got. And she said, "Yeah, why don't you come on down?" And that led to a lifetime relationship with this place. I mean like nonstop. And we looked around at various things they were working on, and there was this particular noise problem on Landsat 5, which had launched in '85, right, and so this was about '88, and they still hadn't fixed it yet. So she said -

LAWSON:

When you're talking noise, do you want to just -

HELDER:

Oh, sure, sure, sure. Yeah. OK. I gotta be a little bit technical, but Landsat 5 was what we called a whisk broom scanner, the Landsat Thematic Mapper. So it basically, as a satellite went north to south over the planet, it had a mirror that scanned the detectors east and west. And it turned out that the east scan and the west scan sometimes were at different intensity levels. So you get these big - we called it banding, for lack of a better name, banding, and nobody could figure it out, and nobody knew how to fix it. So she said, why don't you take a look at that? So I did. And I came up with a correction for that, which is essentially cosmetic, which means I just made it look good, and I did a dissertation on it and wrote it all up. And a couple of funny stories there: When we just had the algorithm done, something called the Gulf War broke out, and there was some customer that EROS had that wanted a big mosaic of the the Middle East from Landsat Thematic Mapper, you know, because that was a high res instrument. And so unbeknownst to me, they said, well, let's use Dennis's algorithm to fix that imagery. And it made it worse. It actually failed big time, you know, and I had my dissertation defense scheduled and everything. It was like the day before Thanksgiving. I remember this well because I couldn't sleep the whole night. And about 4 o'clock in the morning, I had that light bulb turned on, and I said, I know what's wrong, and I fixed it. Anyway, that's how I got started. And I ended up working on Landsat 5 for, gosh, 20 years. Like, you know, that thing lasted 29 years, and I got to work on it for a long portion of that time. And then from there we worked on Landsat 4 and 3 and 2 and 1, back to where Mary started. And we tried to calibrate them so that you could look at a 1972 image and compare it to a 2002 image and see changes that were real on the Earth rather than were an artifact of the instruments themselves. So my work involved calibration of the satellites, radiometric calibration, making sure that the energy received was quantified exactly the same on all of the systems. And so we started with 5 and worked backwards to 1, and then 7 was launched. We did that, and then we did 8, and just last year we did Landsat 9. So that's how I got started and didn't quit. I'm still working part time for EROS, as you alluded to.

LAWSON:

So, Mary, you kind of touched on this, but do you want to describe any more interactions that your department had with EROS over the years?

O'NEILL:

Actually, the list is very long, but I'll just try and hit a few highlights that came to mind. We would take students here quite often for tours, for presentations, meetings, and one of the big things we did was to take advantage of your advanced image processing capabilities. You had better capabilities than we had at SDSU. So we often took folks down here to work in your data analysis lab, or DAL, as we called it. And that was especially true for a lot of visiting scientists we had from around the world. Another big interaction between our two institutions was the Geographic Information Science Center of Excellence, which was established in 2004 at SDSU, but it really was a joint program between SDSU and EROS. That center had two co-directors, one from SDSU and one from EROS. And then there were also 10 senior scientist positions, five of them from SDSU and five from EROS. And then there were a lot of graduate students, a lot of them international, and support personnel involved as well. So that was a big program. And that program is now part of the Geography and Geospatial Sciences Department at SDSU. And of course, as you mentioned earlier, many SDSU graduates have worked here in the past and are still working here as EROS employees. You've hosted many summer internships for students and summer sabbaticals, including one I did back in 1993, which was a lot of fun. And on the flip side, a lot of EROS employees also serve as adjunct faculty for SDSU. So it's a synergistic relationship.

LAWSON:

Now, Dennis, do you want to tell us - you explained that you've worked very closely with EROS through the years, but how did that interaction work?

HELDER:

That's a good question. After I solved the first problem, EROS sort of thought I was worth visiting with from time to time. And so they threw some additional problems at me. And at one point, this lady, June Thormodsgard, said to me, how would you like to do radiometry for us? And at that point in my career, I responded with, what's radiometry? You know, I was an image processing guy like Mario was talking about, and I could fix pixels. But radiometry is the study of how that energy that radiates through the atmosphere up to the satellite forms the pixels, and tracking that from start to finish so that you understand how much energy was there. And you could take that image, those beautiful images that we all enjoy, and turn it into a data set and actually derive scientific information from it. And so the reason that I was asked to do radiometry was because EROS has always had a tremendous expertise on the geometric side of things. In other words, they can put the pixels in the right place, and they were world leaders in that when I started working with EROS, and they're still the world's leaders in it today. They have the top guys that I know of worldwide that put the pixels in the right places. And so by asking SDSU, through my work, to do the radiometry side, that brought a balanced approach to the imagery itself. Are the pixels the right value, and are they in the right place? And so we tried to build up that capability at SDSU to complement EROS's ability that way. So that was, I think, the benefit to working together with the university, where we could focus more on the research going on, and EROS could focus more on how to operationalize that and get it out into the products and and get the products out the door. It's a great relationship. And more recently, like about four years ago, EROS stood up the EROS Cal/Val Center of Excellence, we call it ECCOE. And now EROS has got a team that has expertise in both areas and can work even more effectively, not only with the university partners, but worldwide. That relationship has continued to keep, in my opinion, the EROS Center as the premier calibration center on the planet. That's the kind of expertise that grew out of, I think, our university relationships.

O'NEILL:

And am I right that many of the folks on the team are SDSU graduates?

HELDER:

Yeah. I wasn't going to mention that, but yeah. Let me just think out loud. The government, all three government leads are former students of mine. Good point. OK, you'd better let Mary talk a while.

LAWSON:

I will point out that SDSU is not the only university partnership that EROS enjoys, but it is definitely, you know, proximitywise, it's very handy.

HELDER:

And we've taken advantage of that. I mean, the huge advantage, like Mary said, was students getting to come back and forth, and for extended periods of time.

LAWSON:

Do you both want to describe what you think that, at SDSU, the future of remote sensing there will look like in the next little while or long term?

O'NEILL:

I think one of the things we need to do is work together to identify skills that are going to be needed for the future, the next Landsats and other satellite imaging programs. We need to know what kind of coursework we need to offer to our students to prepare them to work at places like EROS. We have to look ahead. We can't just look back and say, This is what you need to know.

HELDER:

But there's been peaks and valleys over those decades. And if you look at other universities, a lot of those programs died, and you don't see them anymore. But at SDSU, we've kept going. And not only, you know, in one area, but Mary represents the image analysis side. What kind of science can we do with these things? And I present the engineering side. How do we make these as good as we can for the scientist? And I think that's helped us to have a balance. In fact, we developed a doctoral program emphasizing that in the degree in geospatial sciences and engineering, science and engineering coupled together, so that we could talk to each other well. That's benefited the university, and that's benefited EROS.

LAWSON:

Any closing thoughts that either of you has about the relationship between SDSU and EROS?

O'NEILL:

South Dakota and SDSU have been very fortunate to have EROS in the state, and I congratulate you on your 50-year anniversary and wish you the best for many more years.

HELDER:

Yeah, Mary's right, this is just the start. So let's continue to work together and take advantage of what each of our institutions have to offer. EROS has always been a great partner, in my experience, over the years. SDSU's a great university to work at, and so it all boils down to having great people. That's a huge advantage. So let's keep it up.

LAWSON:

Thank you, Mary and Dennis, for joining us for this episode of Eyes on Earth, where we talked about the link between South Dakota State University and EROS through the years. And thank you to the listeners. Check out our EROS Facebook and Twitter pages to watch our newest episodes. You can also subscribe to us on Apple and Google Podcasts.

VARIOUS VOICES:

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