General Historical Background

RS is developed in line with the development of:

 Optical system
 Sensor electronics
 Satellite-platforms
 Transmission development
 Computer data processing
This development result in the improvement of remotely sensed data in quantity, quality, and diversity of
data availability.
When we see the development in years, specifically:
 In 1839, the first aerial photo was taken in French
 In 1840, aerial photo was used to produce topographic map.
 In 1858, French used hot air balloon as a platform and take the first aerial photo at 80m altitude.
 In 1880s and 1900s, British use kites and carrier pigeons respectively.
 In 1909, the major milestone for RS was happened when Wilbur Wright take the first photo from
aircraft over Italy.
 In 1915 and WW I, the British Royal Air Force collect aerial reconnaissance captured using
cameras designed for this purpose.
 In 1930, the first multispectral aerial photographs were taken bay Kirnov in Russia.
 In 1940s and 1950s, the improvement in navigation system gives a way for space born remote
sensing.
 In 1947, the first photo was taken from space at altitude of 200km.
 In 1957, Soviet Union launch Sputnik and this become the starting point for civilian and military
satellite missions.
 In 1960, NASA launch TIROS-1 that begin continental view of global cloud patterns.
 The successful missions of Apollo 6 and 7 in 1968 and Apollo 7 in 1969, encourage NASSA and
this become the reason for the launch of ERTS i.e. Landsat.
 Landsat-1 in 1972, named ERTS-1(later renamed Landsat-1 after the launch of
Landsat-2 in 1975).
 Landsat-2 provided the first detailed, high-resolution, multispectral images of the entire
land surface of our planet.
 The Landsat missions were also accompanied by other NASA environmental observation
projects, such as:
 Skylab, a manned space laboratory in 1973;
 Seasat, an oceanographic satellite in 1978; and
 Heat Capacity Mapping Mission (HCMM) for thermal investigations in 1978.
 Another outstanding development in RS was occurred when French launch the first SPOT
satellite in 1986.
 Japanese in 1987, India in 1988 and Europe in 1991 launch MOS-1, IRS-1 and ERS-1
respectively.
 Private sectors also play a great role for the development of RS, some of the private sectors are:
 Space Imaging (later named DigitalGlobe) launch IKONOS in 1999
 Orbimage (later named GeoEye) launch OrbView-1 in 1995
 Imagesat International launch EROS A1 in 2000 and DigitalGlobe launch Quickbird in
2001.