Landsat 9 Launches Sept. 16, 2021 in:
 
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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 rocket fairing
Landsat 9 Arrives at Vandenberg Space Force Base in Preparation for Launch
The Landsat 9 satellite has arrived at the VSFB on the central coast of California.
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Landsat Flipbook

Summer is time for Camp Landsat!

Join us as we count down to Landsat 9’s September launch with 9 weeks of fun activities at Camp Landsat. [...]
Mosaic of LIMA

NASA Invites You to Create Landsat-Inspired Arts & Crafts

Get ready to do some Landsat-inspired crafting and art making as we get closer to Landsat 9's upcoming September launch. [...]
Blue oak

California's Iconic Blue Oak Woodlands Threatened by Hotter, More Frequent Droughts

California's blue oak woodlands have decreased by more than 1,200 square kilometers. [...]

“With 32 years’ worth of data — and ongoing data collection — the Landsat data record (satellites 5, 7 and 8) captures the decadal and interannual variability in forest losses and gains needed to drive global carbon cycle models.”

— Doug Morton, Apr 1, 2016

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“In a world of scarce resources, there are distinct tradeoffs in costs and benefits of land use, and whether to conserve or convert forest to cropland. Map-based images are perhaps one of the most succinct means of helping policymakers digest complex ideas of social and economically driven environmental change.”

— Glenn Bush, a researcher at the Woods Hole Research Center, May 7, 2015

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“I’d go to meetings and people were just jumping up and down because they had discovered another use for the data.”

— Virginia T. Norwood, talking about early Landsat data, Jun 30, 2021

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“Now that the entire Landsat archive is freely available it has become economically feasible to monitor disturbance over large areas using satellite time series.”

— Todd Schroeder, USDA Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station, Dec 19, 2014

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"Fire perimeters collected using Landsat imagery are accurate, timely and cost-effective."

— Brian Sorbel, May 27, 2014

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“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

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"The novelty of our study lies in the bigger picture—measuring glacier change over all main glaciated ranges in Bolivia—and in the identification of potentially dangerous lakes for the first time."

— Simon Cook, head of a team from Manchester Metropolitan University that measured Bolivian glacier area change from 1986–2014 with Landsat, Oct 20, 2016

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"Landsat is an invaluable resource for developing these high resolution maps. Without the Landsat imagery we would not have the spectral information needed to decompose urban landscapes into Local Climate Zone types. Hence the data is at the heart of the project and it is the most critical piece—without Landsat there is no project."

— Johannes Feddema, University of Victoria, Dec 15, 2016

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"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

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“This research was only possible thanks to the free and open Landsat data policy.”

— Frank Paul, glaciologist, Nov 26, 2015

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