14 DAY TRIAL // The NASA Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite has just turned 10, officials at the space agency are happy to announce. The spacecraft was initially designed to have a year-long mission, and to last in space for 18 months, but it's still kicking today.
The satellite was built by main contractors Swales Aerospace and Northrop Grumman, and is being operated by experts at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), in Greenbelt, Maryland.
It launched aboard a Delta II delivery system from Space Launch Complex 2W at the Vandenberg Air Force Base (VAFB) in California on November 21, 2000. Since then, it continued to constantly amaze its controllers with its capabilities.
At its core, the mission had the main objective of acting as a testbed for new technologies. This is precisely what EO-1 did for the first 12 months it spent in Earth's orbit.
After this stage was completed, the satellite moved to its second set of objectives, which was to collect and relay to ground teams images and data on the world. The third mission was again to act as a testbed, this time for new software.
The computer control programs were developed to test the optimum balance between ground control and autonomous capabilities in conducting basic functions. GSFC mission manager Dan Mandl says the goal was to allow users to focus on the science.
“We’re the satellite people can try things on.” Mandl explains, adding that the spacecraft was developed as part of the American space agency's New Millennium Program.
The three main instruments on the EO-1 are the Advanced Land Imager (ALI), the Hyperspectral Imager (Hyperion), and the Atmospheric Corrector.
“EO-1’s primary purpose was to demonstrate that the Advanced Land Imager (ALI) was a suitable follow-on instrument for Landsat,” explains former GSFC satellite development and launch program manager Bryant Cramer.
What ALI can do is match Landsat's seven-wavelength imaging ability, and add two additional ones. This allows it to provide improved data on coastal water, forests, aerosol levels and crops.
The EO-1 became even more suited for observations once the Hyperion imaging spectrometer was installed, as the new instrument recorded data in more than 200 wavelengths.
“Hyperion has really opened up a whole new avenue of analysis that we hadn’t even explored before,” says archaeologist Stephen Savage, a researcher at the Arizona State University who has been using EO-1 to conduct archaeological investigations.
“I can tell you where in the area the ore is coming from; which parts of the site were used for smelting and which were not; and that different parts of the site were drawing ore from different regions,” he says about an ancient copper mine currently under study.
But the bottom line is that the “EO-1 succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations,” says former GSFC EO-1 project scientist Steve Ungar.