The current version of the Remote Sensing Tutorial (RST) has now updated through January, 2006. In the last 3 years, the principal additions or changes include: 1) Four additions of subsections on Geophysical Remote Sensing, Sensor Technology; Military Satellite Surveillance, and Medical Applications of Remote Sensing, all in the Introduction; 2) Further updates on the Planets in Section 20; 3) A major expansion of the Astronomy-Cosmology Section, including updates on the Mars Rovers and Cassini Saturn mission; 4) More images expanding upon previous and new applications in many of the Sections; 5) A series of new images in the Overview, 6) Examples of imagery returned from non-U.S satellites launched between 2000 and 2003; 7) Mini-tutorials dealing with the basics of Geology and Meteorology; and most recently 8) Special pages on Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and the Everglades as an endangered Ecosystem.
Actually, this page includes not only information on the status of the Tutorial, including new or recent additions, but also provides something of a retrospective review of why earlier changes and additions were made.
IMPORTANT: At least one source of images downloaded from the Internet has complained to the writer, Nicholas M. Short, of inadequate credit for them as the proper holder of a copyright or other legal "ownership". Throughout the Tutorial other scenes may have inadequate accreditation. Contact the writer if you are one of the individuals or groups whose imagery or statements were inadvertently not cited to your stisfaction. We will work with you to rectify the problem. (But, be advised that no funding has been provided by NASA or the writer to pay any use fees; if such is required, we will gladly drop the image(s) used from subsequent display or distribution of the Tutorial.)
FLASH! A further addition to the Tutorial's capabilities has been implemented. Throughout the years of preparation the writer (NMS) has come across videos and webcasts that provide moving pictures or live coverage of topics of relevance to the Tutorial's contents. These were (regretfully now) ignored and left out of the Tutorial. But, during the Mars Rover Spirit coverage, I decided to download two programs - Windows Media Player and RealPlayer - so as to participate in the news conferences. (If you do not have these programs, you can download at Windows Media Player and RealPlayer; for the few programs that require QuickTime, users should search the Net for a download.) Everything worked so well that I decided to make these programs as part of the Tutorial. Over the course of the next few months, I will try to retrace my entries on the Internet to locate programs previously encountered and then to add them, plus new ones of pertinence to the Tutorial.
For the time being, the only video sites that will be included in the Tutorial are about 20 selected from NASA JPL's web site. It's rather tricky to get to the individual videos that will be cited on appropriate pages in this Tutorial. The first step is just to access this JPL Video Site. Once online you will see about 10 of the most recent videos (some are part of the von Karman lecture series and are rather long; others are much more brief but still instructive). There is a much larger list that give the videos by date and title. You cannot go directly to this list using a modified URL. To get to the master list, leave the Subject and Mission box default entries as is. Go to the format box and select Video and click on Search. This will bring up the master list. Scroll down until you find the title/date cited and click on the blue "RealVideo" link. This should bring up the desired video if you have downloaded RealPlayer. These movies work best on high speed DSL or cable access modes. On any page in the Tutorial that contains a citation to one of these videos, the JPL Video Site link will be set up as a URL, then you must access the master list as described above. The title of the presentation will be given along with its date. This should be sufficient to activate the desired video. To test this access method, try it out by bringing up "Finding Mars on Earth", Dec. 2, 2003 which is cited near the top of page 19-10.
The CD-ROM version of the PIT image processing program has now been reloaded successfully onto this version and can be accessed through the instructions in Appendix B. The Web version should now download to your computer (contact Nicholas Short or John Bolton if you experience problems).
For those who are accessing the Tutorial from a CD-ROM, the Home Page that comes up when the Internet version is entered can be displayed by clicking on the (similar but not duplicative) Homepage folder in the CD version. This page contains several useful links.
The Tutorial has been organized in a style or format that makes it optimal for use from a CD-ROM, a recent edition of which has now become available again in 2002. As you may know, there are also Internet Web sites (including at least 50 "mirror" sites) that contain a similar version of the Tutorial. The original Internet URL remains "http://rst.gsfc.nasa.gov". (Note: the Goddard organization - Code 935 - that originally sponsored development of the Tutorial starting in 1995, no longer carries the RST on its server).
Primary sponsorship of the Remote Sensing Tutorial underwent a change on February 1, 2002. The server is now operated by (and is responsible for adding all new material) the RSEOL, Remote Sensing Education and Outreach Laboratory, which is part of CARSTAD, the Center for Airborne Remote Sensing and Technology and Applications Development at Goddard Space Flight Center, Mr. John Bolton, Director. This is part of the EOS (Earth Observations System) program at Goddard. However, all formal funding for the RST has ceased by January 2002. Continued work on the Tutorial is being down in "bootleg" fashing, by voluntary efforts from Nicholas M. Short and John Bolton. However, in December 2005 EOS sponsorship ceased and the Tutorial was removed because it failed to meet current NASA website standards. A new sponsor has been found as will be detailed here when the RST is back online. Entering by the Internet is the appropriate pathway if you are on some type of fast-displaying broadband cable line, or satellite dish, or telephone DSL, T-line, etc. for which the Tutorial has been designed, since this allows use of many images per page. But if you are limited to a phone line and low modem download rates you may find its slowness makes it hard to work through the Tutorial expeditiously. (Suggestions: only download a few pages or at most a Section on a given day and spend enough time to master the contents. Or, alternatively, purchase the CD-ROM version.) At the outset, the principal writer, Dr. Nicholas M. Short, wishes you to be aware of how the Tutorial was put together: First, much material has been drawn from his own publications and his collections of illustrations obtained during his NASA years. Second, additional information was gleaned from some of the standard textbooks, such as those listed in the Overview. Third, a large number of illustrations, and some textual ideas, were downloaded directly from the Internet, especially NASA or NASA-related Web sites; wherever appropriate, these sources are acknowledged. This last approach was vital in producing the Tutorial - it is in effect a "child" of the Internet Age. In this third case, many of the images are probably not acknowledged to their sources' satisfaction. If you are one of these sources, and wish to receive a proper acknowledgement, please contact the primary writer (N.M. Short [or NMS] at the email address below or found on almost every page of the Tutorial. For a time in 1999, work on the Tutorial became a more
collaborative effort as the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs,
Colorado, approached NASA Goddard's Code 935 to become a funding partner in continuing to develop the Tutorial and to maintain the Web online version. From early 1999 to mid-2000, the Air Force Academy was the sole supporting funding sponsor which has facilitated maintaining the host server and adding or changing considerable new text and illustrations. This led to addition of several new Sections for the Tutorial prepared by the Academy. For nearly 18 months thereafter, the Tutorial has benefited from
the combined efforts of these organizations: NASA GSFC Code 935, the USAF Academy, Global Science
and Technology Inc.; additional management was provided by the OAO Corporation and Northern NEF, Inc. Currently, no further direct funding is available to continue the Tutorial but the principal writer (NMS) continues to improve it on his own time for two reasons: 2) being retired, it gives him something "fun" to do; and 2) he gains much satisfaction in trying to continue to improve the overall quality of the RST.
In 1999 the RST was put into a CD-ROM produced under NASA auspices and distributed the the NASA CORE facility. It, however, was never updated and is now quite obsolete, with no plans to get the latest version into that distributorship. The writer (NMS) ADVISES THAT THIS OLD VERSION NOT BE PURCHASED. But he has recently agreed to make individual CD-ROMs available through his own CD-Writer. Contact him either through the instructions accessed on the Title page that comes up on the Internet or by using his email address given below. The Remote Sensing Tutorial as a whole has undergone other significant changes between 1998 and the end of 2005 that are designed to improve the usefulness of this website. In terms of imagery high resolution images from commercial satellites such as IKONOS and OrbImage-3 are first introduced in the Preface and appear where appropriate elsewhere in other Sections. Hyperspectral imagery also is now common enough to warrant insertions. In addition to those mentioned in the first paragraph, a number of other changes have been made to the earlier versions (1996 through 1998) of the Tutorial. Various paragraphs and subpages were modified or added anew. Section 3 dealing with how remote sensing is used to study vegetation has been notably modified. Section 6 was expanded by a factor of 2 to extend the tour from just the United States to the entire world. A new last page in Section 11 introduces the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM). A page on the "Multi-" concept has been inserted in Section 13. Three new pages were added at the end of Section 16 to report results from the EOS-Terra and EOS-Aqua missions. New images, and accompanying text, were incorporated in Section 19, dealing with Mars and Jovian satellites, as well as the Cassini mission to Saturn results, and other miscellaneous topics. Section 20 (in early versions, Appendix A) on "Cosmology" has some major changes and new material. A new Appendix A, History of Space, has been submitted by the Air Force Academy sponsors. Two other important modifications: 1) each page has a summary at the top; and 2) the figure/image captions, initially written out, have been expanded and then hidden - just hold your mouse cursor in the lower right corner of the illustration and the caption emerges after a second or so. An Appendix (B)
has been added to the Tutorial which will allow users to learn and use an interactive image
processing program, called PIT. Although download and setup instructions given in that Appendix should work for most computer systems that enter the Tutorial either on the Internet or from a CD-ROM, in some cases the program may not be retrievable using the Appendix B guidelines. If you are accessing the Tutorial from the CD-ROM, that medium has separate folders called PIT and PIT Images which can be transferred to your computer directly. After working through this appendix, you will
have the opportunity to actually process several types of space imagery using
this computer-based software, which will be included on the CD-ROM as well
as through FTP download across the internet. Its principal feature is a group
of programs that allow one to classify the scene features into a thematic "map"
format. Please be advised that some users have experienced difficulties in downloading the PIT program and the associated PIT images: if you have trouble, please contact NMS at the email address below.
The versions of the Tutorial since 1997 have a powerful instructional device:
most Sections will include a series of questions inserted within relevant parts
of the text. These are designed to stimulate one's learning experience by being
challenged to answer thought questions, to solve using mathematics problems
that rely on equations, to carry out practical exercises requiring interpretations
of imagery, to make lists, or to record your general comments or opinions. A
question is identified by being italicized in brown and at its beginning by a
marker label such as I-3 or 13-8. Unlike most textbooks that have
questions at the end of a chapter, but fail to provide answers, this Tutorial
is closely modeled after the writer's (N.M. Short) earlier Landsat Tutorial
Workbook which had [often subjective] answers to the many questions it contained
in an Appendix). Thus, in this Tutorial the student/user can apply his/her mind
to reaching plausible answers or conducting calculations and then by clicking
on the blue ANSWER be directed to an answer sheet (each section has its own
single page sheet). Once on the answer sheet, to return to the page containing
the question, just click on the BACK button at the end of the answer or on your browser's Back button.
If you did reasonably
well, amy similarities to these stock answers will give you confidence that
you have acquired and can use the information pertinent to the question; if
your answer seems "off" with respect to the one I have provided (assuming I
am more or less "right") then you will still learn by having tried, attained
some level of understanding, and then having been guided to an appropriate measure
of the "truth" in the answer provided. Most questions or exercise activities
will require your brain as the only tool, but some exercises will involve examining
specific images. You can either work directly from your screen or can print
out the image/picture from your computer setup. Some questions have a geographic flavor: keep a U.S. Atlas and a World Atlas handy. Important teaching tools are a beginner's "Get Acquainted" Quiz at the end of the Overview and also two large "exams" that test your accruing knowledge by having you answer questions on a series of related data sets (mostly images). One appears at the end of Section 1 and the second at the close of Section 21. A simple recognition of "Where in the World is this Scene?" is included in Section 6. By all means, do each of these as they will help significantly in your learning process. Many references are made in the Tutorial text to Web sites that serve as references and as sources of complimentary information. As most users of the Internet readily know, URLs are often changed, while some
are even dropped and removed. Be advised that we have striven to make these
as current as possible but as time progresses some will disappear or otherwise
be altered without our knowledge. Bring any problems of this kind to our attention
via e-mail. Those of us involved in this Tutorial project welcome any comments or content
corrections you may wish to pass on to us. You can send your observations directly to: nmshort@ptd.net
