Landsat Calibration/Validation Team members recognized with NASA's Robert H. Goddard Award for Science

Three SPIE Fellows and four SPIE Members were recently awarded the Robert H. Goddard Award for Science for their participation on the Landsat 8 Calibration/Validation Team (CVT), which contributed to the characterization, calibration, and performance understanding of the Landsat 8 sensors.

Since 1972, Landsat satellites have been amassing information about Earth's land cover to better understand big issues like water use, carbon stocks, and global crop production. The Landsat Calibration/Validation Team ensures that Landsat data users can be confident that measurements made day-to-day, year-to-year, and Landsat sensor-to-sensor are comparable.

SPIE-affiliated team members were:

• SPIE Fellow Kurtis Thome, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
• SPIE Fellow John Schott, Rochester Institute of Technology 
• SPIE Fellow Stuart Biggar, University of Arizona
• SPIE Senior Member Jeff Czapla-Myers, University of Arizona
• SPIE Member Phil Dabney, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
• SPIE Member Raviv Levy, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
• SPIE Student Member Frank Pesta, South Dakota State University

The team, managed by Brian Markham, a longtime Landsat calibration scientist at Goddard, included 52 scientists from Goddard, the U.S. Geological Survey, Ball Aerospace & Technology Corp., South Dakota State University, Rochester Institute of Technology, University of Arizona, and the Jet Propulsion Lab.

Several team members are co-authors of papers scheduled to be presented at SPIE Optics + Photonics 2014, including:

• "Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) detector to detector uniformity challenge and performance" [9218-43]
• "On-orbit performance of the Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager" [9218-41]
• "Landsat-8 data processing evolution" [9218-46]
• "Performance of the thermal infrared sensor onboard Landsat 8 over the first year on-orbit" [9218-42]
• "Cross-calibration of Landsat 5 TM, and Landsat 8 OLI with Aqua MODIS using PICS" [9218-19]
• "Landsat-8 Operational Land Imager on-orbit radiometric calibration and stability" [9218-40]
• "Chasing the TIRS ghosts: calibrating the Landsat 8 thermal bands" [9218-45]
• "The absolute radiometric calibration of the Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager using the reflectance-based approach and the Radiometric Calibration Test Site (RadCaTS)" [9218-44]

SPIE Optics + Photonics 2014: http://spie.org/op
Landsat 8 Sweeps the 2013 "Goddards": http://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/?p=8028
Landsat Cal/Val Team Receives 2013 Robert H. Goddard Award for Science: http://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/?p=8017