I really like to think of Lansat as a very sophisticated smartphone camera orbiting the Earth.

Every 16 days it has fully captured imagery from all over the globe.

I can literally drive around the corn belt and I've done this at times, and see what's going on on the ground,

and then also see it in the Lancet imagery. It's a verification that what we see in the imagery

is actually what's happening on the ground. This is NASA's curious universe.

Our universe is a wild and wonderful place.

I'm Patty Boyd, and in this podcast, NASA is your tour guide.

In this episode, we're going out to space, but not too far beyond our atmosphere, we're

going to turn back around and take a look at Earth.

We're exploring how data collected from space can help farmers on the ground.

We're talking about a mission called Lansat. NASA is engaged in the Lansat program because we observe the Earth from space.

We observe it for many purposes.

We observe it to help understand the atmosphere and how it's changing, the oceans and how the oceans are changing.

And finally, the land surfaces the earth and the vegetation and the impact of the humans

on our resources and how we use those resources.

That's Jim Irons. He's the director of the Earth Sciences Division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center,

and also the Project Scientist for Lansat 8.

Lansat is a joint mission of NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey, or USGS.

It holds the title for the longest continuous record of our home planet surface

from space. Since 1970, Lansat has archived images and data of Earth, offering scientists

information about how our world is changing. But it also does something pretty surprising.

This data helps farmers.

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