Where does this come from, and can I check it?

Its sensors record several wavelength bands at once, so vegetation, water and rock can be told apart from orbit. The figure is taken from NASA Landsat, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.

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Yes. It sits on the Technology shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.

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The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.

Mondo Knows Facts

Landsat has photographed Earth since 1972

Its sensors record several wavelength bands at once, so vegetation, water and rock can be told apart from orbit The first Landsat carried a multispectral scanner that recorded four bands at 80 metre resolution, and later spacecraft sharpened that to 30 metres. Because the archive spans five decades, researchers can track glacier retreat, city growth and crop changes over the same ground. Images are distributed free, which turned the program into a shared reference for earth science. It sits in Mondo's technology collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.

Where this comes from

NASA Landsat

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Sun-synchronous orbits keep the same local timeThese near-polar paths precess to match the Sun's apparent yearly motion Molniya orbits linger over high latitudesA satellite on a long ellipse spends most of each twelve hour orbit crawling across the northern sky Satellites run on batteries twice a dayIn geostationary orbit the spacecraft spends about 72 minutes of each day in Earth's shadow and draws on stored power GPS relies on a constellation of at least twenty-four active satellitesThe Global Positioning System calculates positions using atomic clock signals from medium Earth orbit Arthur C. Clarke conceptualized geostationary communications satellites in 1945Orbiting 35,786 kilometres above the equator allows satellites to match Earth's rotational speed Satellite phone networks provide global coverage via low Earth orbit satellitesCross-linked satellites relay phone calls over polar regions and oceans beyond cellular towers

Tags: satellites, earth-observation, imaging

Landsat has photographed Earth since 1972: the short answers

Where does this come from, and can I check it?: Its sensors record several wavelength bands at once, so vegetation, water and rock can be told apart from orbit. The figure is taken from NASA Landsat, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
Is this really a technology fact?: Yes. It sits on the Technology shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
What else can I read about it?: The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.