Thrusting outward into space, we gain new perspective on ourselves.
How beautiful it is our cloud-wreathed spaceship, Planet Earth
How beautiful, and how small.
The Western Test Range in California, July 23rd, 1972.
[engines fire]
Perhaps no new devleopment in space is more significant than this
ERTS – short for Earth Resources Technology Satellite
[music]
At Goddard Space Flight Center at Greenbelt, Maryland,
the operations control center monitors the spacecraft's flight night and day.
Watching every element of its operation and issuing orders
that control its performance.
The color additive viewer is all but indispensible for many investigators.
Among them, NASA's senior geologist, Dr. Nicholas Short.
The color additive viewer is an instrument that uses color filters
to enhance certain features of an image we're particularly interested in.
For instance, here's a black and white picture of the Monterey Bay area in California
produced by the infrared channel on the ERTS Multi-Spectral Scanner.
Now if we project this image through a green filter,
the green tones, which are vegetation, such as the farm areas in the Great Valley
will show up more green. By combining different spectral images
and trying different filters, we can get a wide variety of effects and choose the one that's best suited to our needs.
We here at Dartmouth are concerned about a pressing social and economic problem:
urban sprawl, and conversely with a disappearing resource, open land.
Our general area of interest is the highly urbanized section of the Eastern Seaboard
which extends from Boston southward to Washington,
and to which has been given the name Megalopolis.
Our specific area of interest is the New England section of it.
Increasingly the spreading problems of megalopolis
require a broader base treatment to that of individual metropolitan areas.
This is an ERTS photograph of southeastern New England, Long Island Sound,
the Atlantic Ocean, the face of Cape Cod, and Boston.
By enlarging this area, which corresponds to the state of Rhode Island,
we can make a land use map of that area.
ERTS, a new chapter in space, is in fact a new chapter
in man's effort to prove himself worthy of his Earhtly heritage.
[music]