NASA successfully launches Landsat 9

Context

NASA has successfully launched an earth monitoring satellite landsat 9 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. 

Background

• Landsat Program is a series of Earth-observing satellite missions.
• These missions are jointly managed by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey. 
• This program is the world's longest continuously-acquired collection of data of space-based moderate-resolution land remote sensing data.
• With the cooperation of NASA, The first Earth Resources Technology Satellite (ERTS-1) was launched On July 23, 1972.
• It was later renamed Landsat 1.
• Landsat satellites have collected images of earth and helped understand how land usage has changed over the decades.
• The mission of the landsat 1 is to collect data on the forests, farms, urban areas and freshwater of our home planet, generating the longest continuous record of its kind. 
• Landsat data have contributed to our understanding of Earth in many ways — from measuring the speed of Antarctic glaciers, to tracking the use of  water crop fields in the Western US, to monitoring deforestation in the Amazon rainforest.
• Landsat 7 was launched in 1999 which was followed by Landsat 8,  launched on February 11, 2013, and is in a near-polar orbit of our planet.

About LANDSAT 9

• LANDSAT 9 program is a partnership between NASA and Earth Resources Observation and Science Center, north of Sioux Falls.
• The Landsat 9 joins Landsat 8 and these satellites will together collect images of Earth’s surface. 
• It will take 8 days to capture the whole Earth.
• The main focus is repeating global observations for monitoring, understanding and managing Earth's natural resources.
• Landsat 9 aboard the two instruments- the Operational Land Imager 2 (OLI-2) and the Thermal Infrared Sensor 2 (TIRS-2). 
• OLI-2 
• OLI-2 is a pushbroom sensor that can see the light that we can’t see. 
• It captures sunlight reflected off Earth’s surface and studies the visible, near-infrared, and short wave infrared portions of the spectrum.
• TIRS-2 
• It is an instrument that has a four-element refractive telescope and photosensitive detectors that capture thermal radiation and help study the Earth’s surface temperature.