ABSTRACT
Today, the science, art, and technology of remote sensing are truly ubiquitous and increasingly part of everyone’s everyday life, o¬en without the user knowing it. Whether looking at your own home or farm (e.g., see the following ¤gure), helping you navigate when you drive, visualizing a phenomenon occurring in a distant part of the world (e.g., see the following ¤gure), monitoring events such as droughts and ¨oods, reporting weather, detecting and monitoring troop movements or nuclear sites, studying deforestation, assessing biomass carbon, addressing disasters such as earthquakes or tsunamis, and a host of other applications (e.g., precision farming, crop productivity, water productivity, deforestation, deserti¤cation, water resources management), remote sensing plays a pivotal role. Already, many new innovations are taking place. Companies such as the Planet Labs and Skybox are planning to capture very-highspatial-resolution imagery (typically, sub-meter to 5 meters), even videos from space using a large number of microsatellite constellations. Ÿere are others planning to launch a constellation of hyperspectral or other sensors. Just as the smartphone and social media connected the world, remote sensing is making the world our backyard. No place goes unobserved and no event gets reported without a satellite or other kinds of remote sensing images or their derivatives. Ÿis is how true liberation for any technology and science occurs.
