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Description of Driving Event:

The Landsat program was one of the first NASA programs to develop and introduce a major new capability with a broad commercial, public service, and scientific potential. Therefore, the insights to be gained from this twelve-fifteen years of experience might be of value not only in guiding the future research, development, and test (RD&T) activities in land remote sensing but also to other programs.

The Landsat program and the related R&D programs to develop techniques for extracting useful information from Landsat data have been very successful. However, this success has raised a new set of questions; for example, how and in what form is the technology and capability to be exploited? By whom, the government or private sector? Should the operational capability be internationalized? What is NASA's future role in land remote sensing? With the proper planning NASA should have been in a position to have better answers to these questions.