The LDCM spacecraft is being built by Orbital Sciences Corporation. The spacecraft contract was awarded in April 2008. It will accommodate two government furnished instruments forming the LDCM Observatory, OLI and TIRS. The spacecraft has a design life of 5 years, but carries sufficient fuel for 10 years of operations.
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The Operational Land Imager (OLI) is being built by the Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corporation. The Ball contract was awarded in July 2007. OLI improves on past Landsat sensors using a technical approach demonstrated by a sensor flown on NASA’s experimental EO-1 satellite. OLI is a push-broom sensor with a four-mirror telescope and 12-bit quantization. OLI will collect data for visible, near infrared, and short wave infrared spectral bands as well as a panchromatic band. It has a five-year design life.
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The Thermal InfraRed Sensor (TIRS) was added to the LDCM payload to continue thermal imaging and to support emerging applications such as evapotranspiration rate measurements for water management. TIRS is being built by NASA GSFC and it has a three-year design life. The 100 m TIRS data will be registered to the OLI data to create radiometrically, geometrically, and terrain-corrected 12-bit LDCM data products.
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Launch services are provided by the NASA Kennedy Space Center (KSC). The launch vehicle will be an Atlas-V rocket and is managed by KSC and procured from United Launch Alliance.
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The LDCM Ground System includes all of the ground-based assets needed to operate the LDCM observatory. The primary components of the Ground System are the Mission Operations Element, Collection Activity Planning Element, Ground Network Element, and the Data Processing and Archive System.
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