Knowledge Sharing Presentation about Remote Sensing.

1. The History of Remote
Sensing
November 29, 2019

2. Socrates ~500 BCE
“Man must rise above the earth —
to the top of the atmosphere and
beyond —
for only thus will he fully understand
the world in which he lives.”

3. Three
development
strands
● Photography
● Aeronautics
● Electromagnetism

4. Photography - drawing with light
First description of camera obscura by
Aristotle ~400 BCE
First actual camera obscura developed
by Arab Scientists ~800 CE
BUT: How can the image be fixed
permanently in an automated way?
Niépce and Daguerre in 1839
- required exposure time 15-30 minutes

5. Photography - storing image data
1840s - Emulsion plates could reduce
exposure times to 2-3 seconds
1860s - Dry plates enabled storage of
raw materials
1880s - George Easterman starts
Kodak: first personal cameras
1980s - Digital image storage

6. Aeronautics - up in the air
Spread your wings and fly away...
19th century:
George Cayley “Father of Aeronautics”
Engineering Pioneers: Lilienthal, Philips
Breakthrough: Wright Brothers
20th century:
Some exploration planes during WWI
Big growth up to WWII
Steady growth of aviation industry eversince

7. Aeronautics - beyond the atmosphere
The 1st Space Race:
1957 - Sputnik 1
1961 - First human in Space
1965 - First space walk
1966 - First soft landing on the moon
1968 - First flight around moon and
return to earth

8. Electromagnetism
Light as a perceptible form of energy
1800 - Infrared radiation discovered by
Herschel
1801 - Ultraviolet radiation discovered
by Ritter
1840s-60s - Faraday and Maxwell
develop theory of electromagnetism

9. Electromagnetism
1880s - Hertz: radio waves
1890s - Röntgen: X-rays
1900s - Gamma rays
1950s - Cosmic background
radiation

12. Putting it all together… sort of
19th century - balloon and kite
photography

13. Putting it all together… sort of
1907 - Pigeon photography

14. Putting it all together
WWI

15. Putting it all together
WWII

16. Putting it all together
1950s: First Color-InfraRed (CIR) Imagery during the
Korean War
1950s: declassification of War imagery
(first open data policy)
1962: First International Symposium on Remote
Sensing of the Environment @ Michigan University
1972: First environmental imaging spaceborne
sensor: LandSat

17. Putting it all together
Landsat Legacy:
CIR sensor with “continuous” data for almost 50
years
Actual continuous data (30m res) since almost 40
years (since Landsat 1982)
Landmark Open Data policy since 2008 - opening
full archive and making all data publicly available
since

18. European Efforts
Spot since 1986 (spatial resolution of <20m)
1990s ERS 1&2 (First big SAR Mission)
Early 2000s: Pleiades
Envisat (the disaster)
2010s: Copernicus Sentinel

19. The game changers: space race II
Private companies:
1990s WorldView and DigitalGlobe
1990s/2000s AirBus
2010s PlaneLabs
Now: Capella, IceEye, BlackSky, and others