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

The NASA/USGS Landsat 9 satellite comes out of thermal vacuum testing at Northrop Grumman’s facility in Gilbert, Arizona
Landsat 9 Completes Test Simulating Harsh Space Environment
The Landsat 9 satellite has successfully completed its most strenuous environmental test…
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Female farmers learning about the IAS

South Asian Farmers Fine Tune When to Water with Landsat

Putting NASA and USGS satellite information at farmers’ fingertips leads to less water use and better crop yields in South Asia. [...]
Commercial deforestation in the Amazon

Earth Day Connections: NASA Investigates Vegetation

Scientists use Landsat to track changing patterns of deforestation that tells them how Amazonian agricultural practices have changed, from [...]
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. [...]

"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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"We believe this type of continuous mapping of forest metrics at expansive scales would not have been possible without the excellent radiometric characteristics of Landsat 8, particularly the high level of quantization and the outstanding signal-to-noise ratio, which enables fine distinctions that were not previously possible."

— Rick Lawrence, Montana State University, Dec 15, 2016

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"Landsat provides an unparalleled record of how terrestrial Earth has changed since the early 1970s, closely coinciding with the beginning of rapid environmental change. It provides important historical context for the current state of land cover and land use and provides a reference for identifying abnormal types and rates of change."

— Justin Braaten, Google Earth Engine technical writer/coder, Mar 25, 2021

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“There are more than 800 billion Landsat-derived pixels of land in our imagery. If we printed out just our Landsat-based world map at poster resolution, it would cover two acres.”

— Charlie Loyd, Dec 22, 2014

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"We use Landsat images on a daily basis at SkyTruth for environmental monitoring."

— Kimbra Cutlip, SkyTruth, Oct 3, 2016

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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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“Work has begun on the next mission, Landsat 9, with launch scheduled for late 2020. Plans for the next generation of Landsat are also underway, with a series of studies leading to a decision on the Landsat 10 and beyond architecture in 2018.”

— Timothy Newman, USGS Land Remote Sensing Program Coordinator, Jul 18, 2016

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“Measuring the past contributes to our understanding of the long-term consequences of our past economic and societal choices, and contributes to more informed management decisions in the future.”

— Jean-François Pekel, who used 3 million Landsat images to make global surface water, Dec 9, 2016

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"“When the first images appeared, people would talk about the folds in the Appalachian Mountains. There had been textbooks written that described the processes that lead to those formations. For the first time it was possible to observe from great height what people had been talking about for hundreds of years.”

— Dr. Jim Irons, Landsat 8 Project Scientist, Mar 1, 2014

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"Satellite imagery can help us get the biggest bang for our buck by targeting conservation initiatives in a specific window of time at key locations. Landsat is the longest running Earth observation satellite system we have, and free access to this data enables researchers to look at the effects of seasonality, climate cycles, and long-term trends in land-use change."

— Danica Schaffer-Smith, doctoral student, Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University, Mar 27, 2017

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