At 10:02 a.m. Monday, if all goes as planned at Vandenberg Air
Force Base, the latest generation Earth-observation satellite,
Landsat Data Continuity Mission, a.k.a. Landsat 8, will get a
boost into space atop an Atlas 5 rocket. Since 1972, seven
satellites have documented Earth's continents and coastlines in
images of telling and often astonishing detail. Forty years of
Landsat data, what the government calls a "visible, long-term
record of natural and human-induced changes on the global
landscape," is archived and available online, free for anyone to
use. And it does get used. Water managers in California check
Landsat data to help manage our share of that increasingly rare
resource, right down to figuring out how to irrigate individual
vineyards in the San Joaquin Valley. Wetlands researchers used
the images to measure how much of the Gulf Coast Hurricane
Katrina swallowed up. The data have tracked Amazon deforestation
and, some say, have helped to slow it down. These images aren't
meant to be pretty pictu