Landsat 9

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Recent Imagery

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The Landsat Program

This joint NASA/USGS program provides the longest continuous space-based record of Earth’s land in existence. Every day, Landsat satellites provide essential information to help land managers and policy makers make wise decisions about our resources and our environment. + Landsat Case Studies ebook

Virginia Norwood
Virginia T. Norwood: The Mother of Landsat
We have Virginia Norwood to thank for the design and engineering that made the Landsat program…
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rail bird

Landsat Imagery Could Help an Endangered Bird

Landsat imagery together with the processing power of Google Earth Engine were used to model the best habitat for rails along the Lower [...]
Retreating Glaciers

Greenland’s Retreating Glaciers Could Impact Local Ecology

Many of the Greenland’s glaciers are retreating while also undergoing other physical changes. [...]
Landsat Flipbook

Explore Landsat at Home

Have fun learning about Landsat with these hands-on activities and explore the benefits the Landsat series of satellites have brought to society since 1972. [...]

“Very importantly, big data and its use for societal good is based on really progressive data policies. The Landsat sensor has 40 years of data in the archive and it is available to anyone on the planet.”

— Matt Hansen, Oct 21, 2015

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"Landsat is the oldest continually operated program of its kind: Its satellites have been capturing images of the Earth since the Nixon administration."

— Robinson Meyer, Sep 10, 2014

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"Landsat has really become the gold standard of remote sensing from space. It's provided an invaluable, indelible record of the recent history of our planet."

— Anne Castle, assistant secretary for water and science at the U.S. Department of the Interior, Jul 23, 2012

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“With applied conservation programs, we’re using that [Landsat] imagery to say here are the areas that we can prioritize for conservation management, and here are areas that maybe we can let go. It’s a very powerful tool for getting conservation to happen.”

— Matthew Reiter, quantitative ecologist, Point Blue, Sep 24, 2015

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“For our main aim of quantifying surface water extent dynamics during a period of high hydro-climatic variability, Landsat was the only satellite archive to meet all our criteria.”

— Mirela Tulbure, May 25, 2016

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"Satellite imagery can be used retrospectively, meaning that the data collected by satellites today will probably help solve issues we are not currently even aware of—an advantage which is invaluable."

— Nathalie Pettorelli, Zoological Society of London, Jun 10, 2015

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“We looked at satellite images taken by the NASA-U.S. Geological Survey Landsat missions from 1972 and 1999 and the loss of forest and woodland cover along valleys and steep slopes was clear: eighty percent of the forests were gone. Through our analysis of Landsat forest change maps using GIS, we also calculated that the risk of landslide had increased fivefold during that time.”

— Lilian Pintea, VP of conservation science, Jane Goodal1 Institute, “, Sep 29, 2015

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"An engineering degree opens many doors. It has served me well."

— Jeanine Murphy-Morris, Mar 4, 2014

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“Thanks to satellites and to science, we now know much more about Earth than we did on the first Earth Day fifty years ago.”

— Dr. Michael Freilich, former director of NASA’s Earth Science division, Apr 30, 2020

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"We cannot replace Landsat with Copernicus. In fact the programs complement each other. The world has been benefitting from Landsat data for the past 40 years now. It is really a unique and extremely valuable data source that has provided knowledge and understanding of the planet."

— Josef Aschbacher, Director of EO Programs, European Space Agency, Oct 3, 2018

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