Earth Day and the March for Science will be held on April 22, 2017 — a day to reflect on the work of scientists and engineers to better understand our Earth as a life-giving system. Those from California’s Central Coast played a significant role in what we’ve come to know about our planet.
When NASA was established, its mission statement stated its primary objective was “the expansion of human knowledge of the Earth and of phenomena in the atmosphere and space.” This led hundreds of men and women working in California’s Central Coast to design, build, and test Earth-sensing, satellite-borne instrumentation between 1972 and the early 2000s. The first was the Multispectral Scanning System that launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on the Landsat satellite in 1972. This instrument orbited around the poles mapping the Earth from 438 miles high, which allowed full coverage as the Earth rotated below. Over the next 20 years, several Thematic Mapper instruments were built for Landsat satellites. In fact, for the past 45 years, there have been continuous Landsat operations. The latest and newest is the Landsat 8 satellite.
The Earth-observing instruments were designed, built, and tested for NASA by employees of Santa Barbara Research Center. SBRC was a national asset with a long Santa Barbara–Goleta history dating back to 1952. Since 1972, the Central Coast team has produced many additional Earth-sensing instruments, including MODIS, SeaWiFS, and VIIRS. Designed to last five years, many have been in operation for 20 years or more.