Live/Streaming NASA launch, today, 1pm Eastern Time, Feb 11, 2013

[billski]

Watch live as USGS and NASA make history with the launch of the next generation of Landsat (Landsat Data Continuity Mission). Liftoff is scheduled for launch just after 1pm (Eastern U.S. time): http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

 

[Cannon Gray]

Unlike the previous satellites of the program, Landsat-8 was equipped with not a scanning mirror is used, but a Push broom scanner scheme with linear sensors. In the focal plane of the mission's main instrument, Operational Land Imager (OLI), 14 Focal Plane Modules are installed, each module contains 10 linear sensors of various ranges. The OLI telescope consists of 4 fixed mirrors. The Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) instrument uses a similar design with 3 focal plane modules and a separate telescope of 4 lenses made of germanium and zinc selenide. Using the Push broom architecture requires a huge number of detectors and increased focal plane sizes, however, it allows increasing the exposure from about 10 μs (ETM +) to 4 ms, thereby increasing the signal-to-noise ratio ... The absence of constantly moving parts increases platform stability and improves image geometry.