John Schott will be at the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California next month for the launch of a satellite, Landsat 8, that has ties to the Rochester Institute of Technology in important ways.

As a professor of imaging science at RIT, Schott heads a team at the college that has fine-tuned the sensors — critical for data collection — on this satellite, which is part of the longest standing program for observing the earth’s surface from the sky.

The high-tech bird’s eye view the satellite will provide every 16 days, when its orbit passes over the Rochester area, should give Schott’s team data about pollution in the region’s waters, more sweeping in reach than ground samples.

“So it’s this big picture look — and a big picture look every 16 days,” said Schott, 61, who hopes to chart water pollution trends — including algae formation and runoff — for Lake Ontario, the Genesee River and six ponds.

Perhaps more than anyone else at RIT, Schott has moved the college into the high-tech world of imaging science — away from recording images on film to using sensors and computers that can collect data not recorded on film.

“He is certainly the grandfather of the program,” said Stefi Baum, who is director of RIT’s Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science, established in 1985.

Imaging science — the study of how images are analyzed — has been around since the the first days of photography.

Baum tells how imaging science has become a fundamental part of almost everything that society does and is made possible by the effectiveness of a broad array of energies, optics and detectors.

“Humans understand best by seeing and modern imaging devices allow humans to see things they could never see before as they were unavailable to the human eye,” Baum said.

Schott's skills

With a specialty in remote sensing, Schott joined the RIT faculty in 1980 as a member of the Department of Photographic Science. At the time, most of the imaging science was done by recording images on film.

Schott, who has an undergraduate degree in physics from Canisius College and a master’s and doctorate from the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry at Syracuse, came to RIT after working in remote sensing for eight years at Calspan, a Buffalo-based firm specializing in aerospace research.