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AUSTRALIAN LANDSAT STATION OPERATIONS 
Don Gray and Robin Buckley 
Australian Landsat Station, Australia 
INTRODUCTION 
The Australian Landsat Station (ALS) is a national remote sensing data and 
information service provided by the Division of National Mapping of the 
Australian Department of Resources and Energy. 
It comprises a Data Acquisition Facility (DAF) at Alice Springs in the 
Northern Territory, which became operational in December 1979, and a Data 
Processing Facility (DPF) located in Canberra in the Australian Capital 
Territory, which became operational in mid 1980. 
Its principal functions at present are to receive and pre-process data 
from the Multi Spectral Scanner (MSS) instruments carried on the US 
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration  (NOAA) Landsat series of 
satellites. 
This paper has been prepared to give an overview of the current 
operational environment at the ALS. 
The operational philosophy at the ALS has been largely influenced by the 
following factors: 
1. The country is large and relatively cloud free, resulting in a large 
acquisition and cataloguing task; 
2. the user community, which is generally well informed and performing 
sophisticated image processing, demands high quality products with 
minimal delays; 
3. order levels are highly variable over short time periods and 
throughput must be such that significant delays even in peak order 
periods do not occur; 
4. the great majority of orders are for bulk processed products. 
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