The honor names three program decisions Irons shaped, including a thermal band nearly cut from Landsat 8, that now underpin water use and agricultural analysis built on the continuous record.
Jim Irons spent decades making sure Landsat kept watching Earth the same way, and the Pecora Award is the remote-sensing community saying that work mattered. Irons, a NASA Goddard Space Flight Center scientist profiled by NASA Science as emeritus, has been named a recipient of the William T. Pecora Award, the annual honor given by the U.S. Geological Survey in coordination with NASA for contributions to Earth observation. The award lands as the 50-year Landsat record heads into its own transition to Landsat Next.
The substantive case for the honor sits in three program decisions Irons shaped. The first is calibration. After Landsat 4 and 5 returned to government operation in the early 2000s, Irons pushed for USGS EROS to build an in-house calibration capability, including the geolocation work led by Jim Storey, so that data from successive satellites could be compared like-for-like. That advocacy continued into Landsat 8, where he backed Brian Markham as pre-launch calibration lead. The result is a data record calibrated tightly enough across generations to support climate-scale trend work, not just snapshots.
The second is the thermal band on Landsat 8. NASA Headquarters initially directed the spacecraft to fly without a thermal-infrared sensor, breaking continuity with Landsat 7's thermal data. An independent review board's schedule slip opened a narrow window, and Irons pushed, with Ed Weiler backing the call from NASA Headquarters, to add a thermal instrument built by Kathy Richardson and Fernando Pellerano on a tight schedule. That single decision is what links a 1972-era data stream to operational products like OpenET, an evapotranspiration and water-use monitoring platform built on Landsat thermal imagery, and to the agricultural and water-resource analyses that depend on that record.
The third is cross-program continuity. Irons served as deputy project scientist on Landsat 7 and then as project scientist on Landsat 8 (originally the Landsat Data Continuity Mission), spanning pre-launch through the satellite's operational life. In the NASA Science profile, he frames his role as making sure the next mission did not break what the last one had built. The same profile notes that NASA Headquarters briefly considered flying Landsat 9 with a thermal-only instrument, an idea that never made it to the manifest but illustrates the ongoing tension over how to allocate mass and budget on a flagship Earth-observing platform.
Irons also served as director of NASA Goddard's Earth Science Division during the early COVID-19 period, a role the profile frames in continuity terms: keeping calibration teams, data pipelines, and product developers operating through a period when field campaigns were largely grounded. The Pecora Award does not single out that stint. It is, however, the kind of institutional stewardship that the award's joint USGS-NASA sponsorship tends to recognize, because unbroken records only survive unbroken programs.
What makes the timing more than ceremonial is the question Landsat Next now forces. The next mission is intended to extend the program's continuous record into the 2030s, but with a substantially redesigned instrument suite. The hard, unglamorous work Irons is being honored for, calibrating a new sensor so it looks like the old one, will determine whether the 50-year record becomes a 60-year record or quietly resets. The Pecora Award is the community's acknowledgment that continuity is itself a scientific contribution, one that requires a person willing to argue for a thermal band, a calibration contract, and a USGS partnership that could easily have lapsed.