• theturtlemoves [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      13 days ago

      I know this is a joke, but NASA does incredibly important work running weather satellites and remote sensing stuff. They also maintain archives (with free public access) of the data collected by these satellites, going back decades.

      • Blakey [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        13 days ago

        I thought that stuff was NOAA?

        Gotta say as a non-seppo firing up a browser session to look at their website and being greeted with “the government is shut down” is super bizarre. The last time a budget bill failed to pass here was fifty fuckin years ago and the yanks used it to coup Gough Whitlam because he did a socialised health care.

        • theturtlemoves [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          13 days ago

          There’s some overlap, but in general you need NASA to move the satellites from earth to orbit, maintain them and collect and process the data they send. (The raw data from satellites are things like ‘reflectance at x wavelength’ which can’t be used directly. You need to do complicated black magic to convert that into say temperature or crop cover.)