Remote sensing then and now

In the setting up of CCRS, not nearly enough attention had been paid to Applications because it was assumed that user departments and the Provinces would almost automatically pick this up, once the data became available. How wrong we were. The reason for the Schopenhauer quote at the beginning of the paper relates to the initial user scepticism and reluctance to invest the time of its engineers and scientists in the technology, even though very little money would be required. Some of the provinces were willing, but when the Federal Government was forced to pull out of sharing the cost of provincial centres, they also backed off. Oceanographers, with the exception of Jim Gower and the U.B.C. Institute of Oceanography generally considered that remote sensing had little to contribute to the science. At the senior level in the Dept. of Agriculture, they felt that there was nothing that remote sensing could tell that the farmer and the earth-bound scientist didn't already know. They did finally contribute the services of Alex Mack, who devoted the rest of his career to agricultural applications and was a great support. At the senior level of the Surveys and Mapping group they found it difficult to believe that the ERTS imagery could assist in any way because of the distortion of the image and the lack of ground resolution compared to aerial photography. However Betty Fleming, a senior photogrammetrist with that group quickly determined that the imagery could be used to up-date the planimetry of 1:250,000 and later 1:50,000 maps at very low cost. She worked with Al Gregory, the president of Gregory Geosciences resulting in this company, using their development of the PROCOM projector was able to save that branch $ 10 M over the course of ten years, (Gauthier, 1991 ). Betty Fleming was also the person who devised the global system indexing the ERTS 'scenes' which became internationally-accepted for remote sensing satellite imagery.

Although the geological exploration people in Canada were the biggest users of ERTS data, the Geological Survey of Canada were reluctant to use the data, just as they had been reluctant in the 1950's to place credibility in photogeology, although they used air photos for maps and navigation through the bush. Roy Slaney of the GSC/Geophysics division laboured for ten years to promote its wider use in the GSC, and in the end did succeed.

The water resources people in Environment Canada were more positive and were very quick to use the facility of ERTS to relay data from ground data platforms, containing stream gauges to a central location. They now have nearly 1000 of these platforms in place throughout Canada.

Leo Sayn-Wittgenstein

Reception of Automatic Picture Transmission (APT) cloud data from satellites was already taking place at the Atmospheric Environment Centre in Toronto when CCRS was started, They continually kept in close touch with activities in the National Remote Sensing Program. Their ADMs served on the Interagency Committee on Remote Sensing and their scientists served on the Atmospheric Science Working Group of CACRS for many years. Graham Morrisey served enthusiastically as chairman of the atmospheric working group for many years. This cooperation turned out to be very important as is explained later under the recent splitting of Global Scientific Earth Observation and Operational Remote Sensing as separate disciplines.

Jean Claude Henein

I alluded previously to CCRS involvement in the U.N. 'hassles' about the international legal aspects of remote sensing and of the rights of 'sensed nations' to have some control over the data taken by foreign space powers. Murray Strome, played a big role at the U.N.'s 'Peaceful Uses of Outer Space Committee' by serving on an international drafting committee which, after many years of effort, produced a document acceptable to most nations. I shall not go into this further, as it is very complicated and should be the subject of a separate paper.

CF 100

Over the next two years, attempts were made to interest the air survey companies in remote sensing so they would be in a position to take over from the Air Force. At that time, however, the industry was experiencing hard times and the established companies were unwilling to send their technical personnel to working group meetings to learn the technology. There was, however a start-up company by the name of Intera (Editor's note: In 2003 this company is called Intermap Technologies) managed by Bob Holmes of Calgary that owned one Cessna Aircraft. They were interested in remote sensing and were marketing IR scanning surveys for experimental purposes. Bob Holmes was unfortunately killed in an accident with his own aircraft and the company was taken over by a small group of employees led by Brian Bullock, the current president of Intera. When the time came for CCRS to call for tenders on the operation of their aircraft, Intera teamed up with Innotech Aviation of Montreal and underbid a consortium of the air survey companies, winning the bid.

DC-3

Approval for this plan was given by Cabinet on the understanding that the operation of these aircraft would be handled by a contract to a civilian operator within two years. This did in fact happen and the civilian contract was managed by a partnership arrangement between Innotech Aviation of Montreal and Intera of Calgary. The joint operating company was called 'Intertech'. A hangar was rented from Spartan Air Services and the airborne remote sensing division moved in with the aircraft. Major Gardiner along with several of his pilots and operators when they retired from the Canadian Forces were hired by Innotech to become their remote sensing division based in Ottawa.

Falcon Fanjet

Multiple users from government, universities and industry were allowed to use these aircraft for experimental flights if they were able to justify the scientific merit of their proposed experiment. Scheduling was managed by retired Major Ernie Maclaren, a top airborne surveillance officer from the No. 1 Air Division Headquarters in Lahr, Germany.