Earth Observing-1

The Earth Observing-1 Mission (EO-1) satellite is part of NASA's New Millennium Program (NMP), to develop and validate a number of instrument and spacecraft bus breakthrough technologies designed to enable the development of future earth imaging observatories that will have a significant increase in performance while also having reduced cost and mass.

Its Advanced Land Imager (ALI) measures nine different wavelengths simultaneously, instead of the seven measured by the imager in Landsat 7. This permits a greater flexibility in false-color imagery. Another improvement is that instead of having an imaging spectrometer that sweeps from side to side, the ALI has a linear array of spectrometers that each scan a strip of ground parallel to that of adjacent spectrometers. In order to compare the two imagers, EO-1 follows Landsat 7 in its orbit by exactly one minute. Other new technologies include: