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Full Landsat Archive to be Free and Land Cover for Local Governments

posted by Satri on Thursday April 24, @01:46PM   Printer-friendly   Email story  Permalink  Trackback URI  Slashdotthis  Diggthis  Del.icio.us
from the some-geodata-wants-to-be-free dept.
Very Spatial informs us of the USGS plans to make available at no charge the whole Landsat archives within a year. Additionally, Directions Mag runs an article on satellite imagery growth, specifically on land cover products for local governments. From the article: "I, for one, am excited to see innovative, value-added processing of satellite imagery. The little bursts seen in recent years seem to come and go quickly. Perhaps we've turned a corner and this will be the first of many data layers regularly extracted from the terabytes of high-resolution satellite imagery data available worldwide and turned into products for immediate use in the public and private sector." Browse our Land Cover topic for more. Update: 04/29 20:45 GMT by S : The EOPortal informs us NASA has selected the contractor for the Landsat Data Continuity Mission Spacecraft.

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Technology: Landsat Data Continuity Mission Update [+]
Last week ago we told you about Landsat-5 problems, Very Spatial links to a NASA update on the Landsat Data Continuity Mission. This topic was discussed a few times before (see previous stories below). The article's introduction: "In a world newly awash with geospatial information, only Landsat offers a rich archive of global mid-resolution, highly calibrated, multispectral data of Earth’s landmasses. To extend this legacy, plans are in the works for a July 2011 launch of the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM), which will collect and archive data consistent with its predecessor Landsat satellites. This July, NASA selected Ball Aerospace and Technology Corporation to build LDCM’s Operational Land Imager (OLI) instrument, bringing the long-awaited Landsat follow-on mission closer to actualization."
Industry: Microsoft Sued Over Terraserver [+]
All Points Blog reports that Microsoft is currently being sued by TerraServer.com over the use of the Terraserver name. From their summary : "Microsoft's TerraServer-USA satellite imagery project has been slapped with a trademark lawsuit from a small North Carolina company with a confusingly similar name.

Terraserver.com filed the suit on Friday in North Carolina federal court, seeking monetary damages and asking that Microsoft be stopped from using the TerraServer name."


For more information, please visit the All Points Blog.
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  • Yes good news

    (Score:2, Interesting)
    by winwaed (1455) on Thursday April 24, @04:35PM (#2330)
    ( http://www.mapping-tools.com/ )
    But then free data invariably is! Recently I've been doing a lot of searching for free / low cost high resolution imagery for a part of Costa Rica. Images do exist but processing and cloud are the main problems. Of course I'm interested in a rain forest area which is more often than not under cloud.

    In other words hi-res Imagery with some processing would be great...
    --
    Richard Marsden http://www.winwaed.com http://www.mapping-tools.com