Researchers are fawning over improved images from the new Landsat 7 satellite. But they also worry that there may not be a suitable successor to the government-built spacecraft. Last month a small group of earth scientists got their first detailed look at data from a $700 million U.S. earth-monitoring satellite. It was a knockout. Landsat 7, launched in April 1999, was performing far above expectations, producing detailed images of forests, volcanoes, ice sheets, and other signs of global changes. "This is the finest terrestrial observatory we have ever flown," crowed Sam Goward, a geologist at the University of Maryland, College Park.
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