Apr 15 1999
From The Space Library
Landsat-7 launched successfully from Vandenberg Air Force Base. Although Lockheed Martin, Missiles and Space, had built Landsat-7, the newest land-surface observation satellite, with a design life of five years, the company's spokesperson remarked that 15 years after its 1984 launch, Landsat-S continued in operation. The upper stage of the rocket that launched the commercially built Landsat-6 in October 1993 had failed to fire the satellite into orbit, destroying the craft and prompting NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey to resume control of the Landsat program in 1994. The latest model in the satellite series carried "a new generation of remote-sensing devices far more sophisticated than the equipment on satellites mapping Earth over the past decade." Raytheon Remote Sensing of Santa Barbara, California, had built the craft's enhanced thematic mapper to measure solar radiation reflected off the Earth's surface. The device was capable of capturing images of Earth's surface in 114-mile-wide (183-kilometer-wide) swaths and could resolve images as small as 50 feet (15 meters) across.
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