Landsat Science

Landsat Science

Landsat Science

Landsat Science

50 Years of

Landsat Science

“If you really want a long history of understanding any process on Earth, Landsat is where you should go.”

-Tasso Azevedo, MapBiomas Initiative

50 Years of

Landsat Science

“If you really want a long history of understanding any process on Earth, Landsat is where you should go.”

-Tasso Azevedo, MapBiomas Initiative

50 Years of

Landsat Science

“If you really want a long history of understanding any process on Earth, Landsat is where you should go.”

-Tasso Azevedo, MapBiomas Initiative

Shanghai, 1989

A Planetary Sage: Landsat at 50

July 21, 2022

Landsat satellites have been reliably returning images of Earth’s land surface for fifty years, providing novel insights about the planet we call home.

Morgan Crowley

50 Years, 50 Stories: Morgan A. Crowley

August 5, 2022

In my Ph.D. research at McGill University in Canada, I used Landsat data to map fire progressions for Canadian wildfires.

Brett Baker

The View from Space Keeps Getting Better

July 29, 2022

After 50 years of Landsat, discovery of new commercial and scientific uses is only accelerating.

Virginia Norwood and the little scanner that could

Virginia Norwood & the Little Scanner that Could

July 23, 2022

Virginia T. Norwood, known as the person who could solve impossible problems, played a crucial role in the development of the first space-based multispectral scanner instrument that flew on Landsat 1 and made the mission a success.

Shanghai, 1989

A Planetary Sage: Landsat at 50

July 21, 2022

Landsat satellites have been reliably returning images of Earth’s land surface for fifty years, providing novel insights about the planet we call home.

Morgan Crowley

50 Years, 50 Stories: Morgan A. Crowley

August 5, 2022

In my Ph.D. research at McGill University in Canada, I used Landsat data to map fire progressions for Canadian wildfires.

Brett Baker

The View from Space Keeps Getting Better

July 29, 2022

After 50 years of Landsat, discovery of new commercial and scientific uses is only accelerating.

Virginia Norwood and the little scanner that could

Virginia Norwood & the Little Scanner that Could

July 23, 2022

Virginia T. Norwood, known as the person who could solve impossible problems, played a crucial role in the development of the first space-based multispectral scanner instrument that flew on Landsat 1 and made the mission a success.

Mapping Missing Mangroves

August 5, 2022

Summer Melting in Svalbard

August 4, 2022

Muruntau Gold Mine

August 3, 2022

“Landsat is widely considered to be a crucial national asset, comparable to the satellite-based GPS system and National Weather Service satellites. Ready access to Landsat images supplies a reliable common record of Earth conditions that fosters the mutual understanding of environmental challenges by citizens, researchers, and decision makers worldwide.”

— USGS press release , Jan 14, 2015

“Having Landsat 9 in progress, and a long-term commitment to sustainable land imaging, is great for natural resource science and for data-driven industries such as precision agriculture and insurance.”

— Sarah Ryker, USGS deputy associate director for climate and land use change , Apr 16, 2015

“The long-term acquisition plan of the Landsat mission provides a unique and invaluable dataset for tracking multi-decadal changes in the density and distribution of mangroves at continental scales.”

— Dr. Leo Lymburner, Landsat Science Team Member , Dec 4, 2019

“The growth of open satellite-image archives such as Landsat is leading to more sophisticated data products.”

— Andrew K. Skidmore, et al. , Jul 23, 2015

“We have brought it from the brink of death and back to life so many times over the last seven years. It’s just amazing what our flight operations team and our engineers are able to do with that spacecraft. It’s the oldest spacecraft of its type still functioning. We’ve certainly gotten our money’s worth out of it.”

— Kristi Kline, Landsat program manager at the USGS Earth Resources Science and Observation Center , Jan 13, 2010

“By combining the 34-year record provided by Landsat [30 m] with climate data, we can now quantify relations between water availability and vegetation dynamics in ways that were not previously possible.”

— Dr. Christine Albano, ecohydrologist at the Desert Research Institute , Dec 13, 2019

“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

“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

“Many of our customers’ work couldn’t be done without Landsat.”

— Jed Sundwall , Mar 19, 2015

“We’ve got this data of every field, of every country…. the archive is just going to continue to yield good information, good science, better management, reduce costs. It’s incredible.”

— John Schott, Rochester Institute of Technology, on the Landsat archive , Jan 9, 2018

“In many cases the Landsat archive has provided the only consistent source of information to monitor changes in the surface of the Earth.”

— Matthew B.J. Purss et al. , Mar 31, 2015

“Landsat has been one of the only ways we can directly measure the global food supply.”

— Brad Doorn, program manager for NASA’s Applied Sciences Water Resources and Agriculture Research at NASA Headquarters in Washington , Nov 27, 2019

“Landsat is key to a wide range of applications that support global glacier monitoring and elucidate the impacts of global climate change.”

— Frank Paul, glaciologist , Nov 27, 2015

“This is an example of something government can do well: investing in infrastructure that broadly benefits society, and provides a stable platform for the development of businesses and economic activity. Landsat is the data equivalent of the interstate highway system, a public good that has spawned a thriving for-profit remote sensing industry in the US and beyond.”

— Kimbra Cutlip, SkyTruth , Oct 3, 2016

“By using Landsat 8 imagery, and classification tree analysis, which is an advanced artificial intelligence routine, we have been able to construct a reliable classification system to identify cheatgrass infestations that is accurate. This has implications for fire susceptibility. Cheatgrass is driving wildfire on rangelands and we need to identify areas that have heightened susceptibility to wildfire.”

— Keith Weber, director of the Idaho State University GIS Center , Aug 7, 2015

“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

“The results of the Scopus bibliometric analysis indicate that inland water quality remote sensing has been growing dramatically since its introduction in the 1970s…The most pronounced year-on-year jump occurs right after 2008, which corresponds to the public release of freely available Landsat imagery by NASA and the US Geological Survey…This result is consistent with previous research showing that for multiple earth observation fields, the release of the Landsat archive resulted in more fr…

— Simon N. Topp et al., 2020 , Jan 7, 2020

“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

“There are roughly 400 billion land pixels in a single [Landsat] global mosaic.” (With at least one image of every location on Earth per season every year, the entire 43-year Landsat record contains more than 50 trillion pixels.)

— Rama Nemani , Mar 26, 2015

“Without Landsat, ‘we would be flying blind. We need those eyes in the sky to complement our ground efforts.'”

— Ulyana Nadia Horodyskyj, glaciologist and advisor to the Nepalese government on Himalayan glacial lakes and outburst floods , Dec 6, 2016

“The Landsat science community is giddy at the results they’re seeing from the latest Landsat instrument. It’s that much better than the last one.”

— Cary Ludtke, Operational Space VP and General Manager, Ball Aerospace & Technology Corp. , Nov 6, 2014

“As a researcher with a limited budget, using the Landsat data for free made this project possible. The global geographic range together with free availability ensures that our study could potentially be repeated in other countries.”

— Kristine Engemann, Department of Bioscience at Aarhus University in Denmark , May 22, 2019

“A new era of open-access satellite data has arrived. In 2008, The U.S. Geological Survey released for free to the public its Landsat archive, which dates back to the 1970s and is the world’s largest collection of Earth imagery.”

— Wulder & Coops , Sep 4, 2014

“Free and open access to the Landsat archive has already spurred scientific innovation and provided a foundation for REDD+ monitoring, reporting and verification.”

— Doug Morton, NASA Goddard , Apr 27, 2016

The NASA/USGS Landsat Program provides the longest continuous space-based record of Earth’s land in existence. Landsat data give us information essential for making informed decisions about Earth’s resources and environment.