Landsat 9

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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

Landsat 9 collecting data
Landsat 9—Continuing the Legacy
This new four-part video series shares the history of Landsat, how Landsat 9 works, how Landsat…
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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. [...]

"Freely available data from the U.S. Government is an important national resource, serving as fuel for entrepreneurship, innovation, scientific discovery, and other public benefits."

— Erie Meyer, Office of Science and Technology Policy, Apr 8, 2014

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"Landsat is the only satellite data archive that allows the quantification of vegetation and flooding dynamics relationships across such a large area. Key features unique to the Landsat archive that are paramount for our work include the archive’s temporal depth and detail provided by over a quarter century of systematically acquired time series of imagery at management-relevant spatial resolution."

— Dr. Mark Broich, Geospatial Analysis for Environmental Change Lab, University of New South Wales, Dec 15, 2016

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"It is undeniable that having access to long-term satellite data has allowed ecologists and environmental managers to increase their understanding of the natural world, to make predictions about how this world might transform and to design efficient mitigation and adaptation strategies in the face of global environmental change."

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

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"If you don't do the calibration right, you can't do anything else."

— Eric Vermote, Mar 13, 2019

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“What a Landsat it is! The data are strikingly good and the delivery system is flawless. Landsat 8 arrives just as Landsat data use has exploded under the free data policy and the ability to deliver geolocated and atmospherically-corrected products… new and exciting applications are being revealed daily.”

— Alan Strahler, Nov 18, 2014

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"The Landsat archives were the foundation of our study. Landsat unlocks the previous three decades’ of global river changes by recording these 'natural experiments.' We were able to quantify the degree of accelerated migration and channel widening caused by 13 cutoff events, estimate the amount of sediment released into the channel due to the cutoffs, and infer the physical processes driving river response to cutoffs."

— Jon Schwenk, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, Dec 16, 2016

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"Landsat makes it possible to compare images over almost 5 decades and makes the role of climate change unmistakable in this incredibly beautiful mountainous part of Alaska."

— Dr. Christopher Shuman, glaciologist with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the University of Maryland at Baltimore County, Dec 11, 2019

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“I don’t think there’s any question about how important and how valuable MSS is.”

— Dr. Warren Cohen, U.S. Forest Service, Landsat Science Team former member, Apr 28, 2020

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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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"Since late 2008, when Landsat data was made available to all users free of charge, over 22 million Landsat scenes have been downloaded through the USGS-EROS website—and the rate of downloads is still increasing."

— USGS press release, Jan 14, 2015

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