Tech Briefs Magazine - February 2023 - 46

SPINOFF
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This map depicting the ages of buildings in downtown Amsterdam was built with the Mapbox platform,
which used Landsat data to get its start. (Image: Parallel Data Intelligence Ltd., Mapbox Inc.)
Maps became one of the most widespread
uses for Landsat data, especially
after 2008, when the Department of the
Interior made all the imagery available
free of charge.
While driver navigation software usually
does not use satellite imagery, applications
for hikers, runners, and bikers,
for example, rely on it heavily. " For apps
like Strava and AllTrails, satellite imagery
is a significant enhancement for their users, "
said Alistair Miller, who heads imagery
products and partnerships for Mapbox
Inc., naming two of the company's
prominent customers. Mapbox provides
a platform that enable developers to create
map-based customized applications.
As a small startup in 2010, he said,
the company couldn't spend millions
on proprietary images and instead integrated
data from Landsat. The global
coverage and regular updates enabled
the company to build huge, cloud-free
images of Earth.
The company eventually started purchasing
commercial, high-resolution
images, and today Mapbox blends these
with data from one of Landsat's direct
descendants, NASA's Moderate Resolution
Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS)
to let users seamlessly zoom in and
out of views.
Agriculture and adjacent industries
like farm equipment manufacturers
and grain futures traders are among the
heaviest users of Earth-imaging satellite
data, which can help assess crop health
and predict yields.
Perennial Inc., formerly Cloud Agronomics,
was founded in 2018 to validate
sustainable farming practices by measuring
carbon stored in the earth. To do this,
the company relies on Landsat, as well as
46
the European Space Agency's Sentinel
satellites.
Perennial is working to enable the
emerging markets for carbon credits,
through which farmers can get paid
for using practices that maximize their
land's storage of carbon, explained CTO
David Schurman. These might include
reducing soil
tillage, planting cover
crops during the off season, and reducing
fertilizer usage. Satellite images can
determine not only whether a farm is using
these techniques but also the carbon
content of the ground.
Landsat provided the scientific-grade
images that enabled all this, but Perennial
had to figure out how to use that data
to determine soil carbon content. While
it's not unusual for a company to put in
this kind of work, NASA and the USGS
also continually work to create tools and
practical applications for Landsat.
" Many of the scientists and software
engineers on the OpenET team have
been working on these models and approaches
for more than a decade, " said
Forrest Melton, NASA's Project Scientist
for OpenET. The platform uses Landsat
data to essentially determine how much
energy from the sun is reflected from
Earth's surface, versus how much is absorbed
by the surface and the air.
Reprocessing and uploading the entire
Landsat archive to the cloud was the
biggest effort of the last several years at
the USGS Earth Resources Observation
and Science Center and the researchers
are constantly working to extract more
information from Landsat data.
For more information, visit https://
spinoff.nasa.gov/View-from-SpaceKeeps-Getting-Better.
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Tech Briefs Magazine - February 2023

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