Joe Francica and the other good folks at Directions Magazine and their “All Points Blog” just moved an interesting story headlined below.  No doubt this will call for some tweaking of projections and a ton of storage space, depending on your area of interest, but it also bodes well for those arguing about who should have access to the data taxpayers have already paid for.

Sunday, August 3. 2008

Kempthorne Announces that 35 Years of Landsat Data Free to Public 

“Speaking at the ESRI UC Senior Executive Summit in San Diego, U.S.
Secretary of the Interior, Dirk Kempthorne, announced that the 35 years
of archived Landsat data will be made available over the web free to
the public by the end of the year. The EROS Data Center (EDC) of the
USGS will be the lead center to implement this initiative. Though not
mentioned specifically, it's likely that some of the data may be
released through EDC's EarthExplorer portal that was a pilot project begun last year for Landsat 7 data.

“Listen to my interview with Secretary Kempthorne and USGS Director Mark
Myers regarding the announcement of the Landsat data and a follow up
questions I asked regarding the USGS's roll in providing policy-makers
information about the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and
offshore drilling.”