Satellites help keep geologist grounded

BY JACK MONEY

Published: November 9, 2008

A modern-day prospector — that’s what you get when you train a geologist as a "remote sensing specialist.”

Oklahoma has one here, and he’s been pioneering the field for the past 40 years.

Jan Cannon, 67, of Tecumseh also recently made the news when a company he partly owns announced a large find of magnetite, an iron ore, and ilmenite, an iron titanium oxide ore used to help make titanium dioxide.

How’d he find it? Using a satellite equipped with a digital camera, he said.

Flying high

After earning his master’s degree at the University of Oklahoma, Cannon’s real interest was in the U.S. efforts to get to the moon.

So he went to work for the National Aeronautical Space Administration in 1967 to make maps of potential landing sites for the Apollo missions.

Government officials also put Cannon in the agency’s satellite program when they realized he had a good background in physics. There, he helped design Landsat, a generation of satellites that examine the earth for minerals, for soils, for water quality, and even for oil and gas.

A Landsat orbits about 500 miles above the surface of the planet and covers its entire surface once every 16 days, Cannon noted. And it uses a digital camera system.

"It is where all the digital camera systems were born.”

And here’s just a little bit of Landsat trivia: The first satellite image ever processed by a Landsat was Mill Creek in Oklahoma, a location Cannon picked because the area has a variety of minerals, including pure quartz silica sand that is used in fiber optics.

The area also has dolomite, which is used in high temperature ceramics, and limestone, and granite.

Landsat 7 is up there now, he said.

Research bonanza

These satellites also give researchers such as Cannon an excellent research tool. "I can look anywhere in the world for minerals, oil and gas fields,” he said. The satellite does that by looking at the earth through different spectrums, like infra red, ultra violet, and others that can’t been seen with the naked eye.

"That expands the information you get from a point on the earth tremendously,” Cannon said.

Today, he does the work as a consultant for mining companies and oil companies that want the information. And he can do his prospecting from the comfort of his own home in Tecumseh.

As for the find announced earlier this year, Cannon described it as significant. While the ores are common, they are difficult to find in concentrations that are economical to mine. Both are used in aircraft construction because they are strong as steel, as light as aluminum and rust resistant.

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