VIDEO: NASA's Thermal InfraRed Sensor (TIRS): Thermal imaging and water management from space

The Thermal InfraRed Sensors (TIRS) is one of the instruments on the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) satellite. It will continue the archive of thermal imaging and support emerging applications such as evapotranspiration rate measurements for water management. TIRS is being built by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) and has a three-year design life. TIRS operates in a pushbroom mode to create images in two IR bands. It includes cryogenically-cooled Quantum Well Infrared Photo Detector (QIPD) arrays as well as a steerable mirror to choose among 3 views: nadir for Earth observations, on-board warm blackbody for calibration and deep space for calibration.