Seasat—A 25-Year Legacy of Success
Remote Sensing of Environment 94 (2005) 384–404 www.elsevier.com/locate/rse Seasat—A 25-year legacy of success Diane L. Evansa,*, Werner Alpersb, Anny Cazenavec, Charles Elachia, Tom Farra, David Glackind, Benjamin Holta, Linwood Jonese, W. Timothy Liua, Walt McCandlessf, Yves Menardg, Richard Mooreh, Eni Njokua aJet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91109, United States bUniversitaet Hamburg, Institut fuer Meereskunde, D-22529 Hamburg, Germany cLaboratoire d´Etudes en Geophysique et Oceanographie Spatiales, Centre National d´Etudes Spatiales, Toulouse 31401, France dThe Aerospace Corporation, Los Angeles, CA 90009, United States eCentral Florida Remote Sensing Laboratory, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL 32816, United States fUser Systems Enterprises, Denver, CO 80220, United States gCentre National d´Etudes Spatiales, Toulouse 31401, France hThe University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 66047-1840, United States Received 10 June 2004; received in revised form 13 September 2004; accepted 16 September 2004 Abstract Thousands of scientific publications and dozens of textbooks include data from instruments derived from NASA’s Seasat. The Seasat mission was launched on June 26, 1978, on an Atlas-Agena rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base. It was the first Earth-orbiting satellite to carry four complementary microwave experiments—the Radar Altimeter (ALT) to measure ocean surface topography by measuring spacecraft altitude above the ocean surface; the Seasat-A Satellite Scatterometer (SASS), to measure wind speed and direction over the ocean; the Scanning Multichannel Microwave Radiometer (SMMR) to measure surface wind speed, ocean surface temperature, atmospheric water vapor content, rain rate, and ice coverage; and the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), to image the ocean surface, polar ice caps, and coastal regions.
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