Nasa will launch one of its most powerful and advanced satellites to monitor Earth on Monday, the Landsat-9 will hitch a ride on the United Launch Alliance rocket. The liftoff is scheduled for 2.12 pm EDT (11.42 pm IST) from the Vandenberg Space Force Base.

Once into orbit, Landsat-9, along with its sister satellite Landsat-8, will collect images from across the planet every eight days to help monitor the Earth’s health and help people manage essential resources including crops, irrigation water, and forests. The satellite will orbit the planet every 99 minutes and complete 14 orbits every day around the planet.

Nasa has said that the Images from Landsat 9 will be added to nearly 50 years of free and publicly available data from the mission the longest data record of Earth’s landscapes taken from space. “Landsat’s medium-resolution imaging capabilities allow researchers to harmonize the images to detect the footprint of human activities and their impact on our home planet over the decades,” the space agency said.

WHAT IS LANDSAT-9?

Landsat-9 is an advanced satellite, ninth in the series, which will monitor key natural and economic resources from orbit. The satellite will be managed by Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center and will carry two key instruments onboard the Operational Land Imager 2 (OLI-2), which collects images of Earth’s landscapes in visible, near-infrared and shortwave infrared light, and the Thermal Infrared Sensor 2 (TIRS-2), which measures the temperature of land surfaces.

A graphic showing Landsat-9 in its orbit over Earth. (Photo: Nasa)

Landsat-9 is part of a joint mission by Nasa and the US Geological Survey, which over five decades have helped in understanding the functioning of the planet and the rapid changes it goes through. Landsat series has helped in measuring several changes including the speed of Antarctic glaciers, track water use in crop fields, monitor deforestation in the Amazon rainforest.

Currently, Nasa is operating the Landsat-7 and Landsat-8 in an orbital pattern every 16 days, with the two spacecraft offset so that each spot on Earth is measured by one or the other every eight days. “As the Landsat satellites orbit, the instruments capture scenes across a swath of the planet that is 185 kilometres wide. Each pixel in these images is 30-meters across, which is about the size of a baseball infield, or — more important for resource management — an average US crop field,” Nasa said.

Nasa first launched Landsat in 1972 under the name of Earth Resources Technology Satellite (ERTS) which captured eight million images of the planet. “Landsat satellites give us a global perspective of how Earth is changing. That change could be due to natural causes like earthquakes, or due to human-caused drivers like greenhouse gas emissions that lead to warming temperatures on a global scale,” the agency said.

MONITORING PLANETARY CHANGES CRUCIAL

With the Earth getting warmer and countries scrambling to prevent it from further damaging, watching the changes from above will provide a holistic view of the developments. With climate change roaring across the world and effects being felt in every corner, the satellite will help in monitoring changes to Earth’s land surfaces at a scale that shows the natural and human-caused change.

The United Launch Alliance rocket (ULA) with Landsat-9 rolled on to the launch tower. (Photo: ULA)

Meanwhile, the freely available information from the satellite will not only aid government authorities but also help identify the type and distribution of major crops across the globe, measure how agriculture is expanding or shrinking in remote regions, and monitor crop health and the condition of pastures and rangelands.

“This information is used to predict levels of food production, produce commodity forecasts used by the US Department of Agriculture, help farmers make planting decisions, and anticipate global or regional food shortages to aid in relief planning,” Nasa said, adding that data will also help scientists map Earth’s forests.