The first photo taken from space was captured by a rocket-borne camera launched from New Mexico in October 1946. It showed a grainy black-and-white image with clouds and a sharp horizontal line where the atmosphere ended and outer space began. As the Space Race gave us the ability to reach greater extraterrestrial vantage points, NASA’s Landsat satellites began to take photographs of Earth’s surface for research purposes, a process known as “remote sensing.”
The data are publicly available and used in a variety of ways. Most non-scientists, however, need tools and training in order to understand and utilize these data effectively. NASA’s Applied Sciences Program aims to bridge this gap and enable people to use scientific information for their own purposes.