“The long, consistent view of Earth from space provided by Landsat sparks advances in science, enables more efficient natural resources management, and promotes profitable applications of the data in commerce and industry. In step with the National Research Council and other objective reviews, the non-federal Landsat Advisory Group has found that the broad benefits of Landsat far outweigh the cost.”

“Satellite technologies have led to one of the most productive periods in the history of cartography, comparable only to the golden age of mapmaking in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”

“@USGSLandsat @NASA_Landsat wrote the book on open data, how to do it right, how it creates businesses and benefits economy, and — of course — gifts the world with a 4+ decade *scientific* record of our planet’s changing dynamics.”

“Landsat 8 is part of a revolution of how much remote sensing can do to track the polar areas.”

“I would summarize Landsat 8’s science impacts in three ways: More data, better data, and improved, expanded applications.”

“This project would have been entirely impossible without the free and open-access data policy of the NASA/USGS Landsat-data archive.”

“It’s being able to go back in time for the same location, with the same program, that’s given us a tremendous amount of really valuable information… With Landsat we can do that because the archive is so rich.”

“The Deltares Aqua Monitor is the first global-scale tool that shows at 30-m resolution where water is converted to land and vice versa. With assistance from Google Earth Engine, it analyzes satellite imagery from multiple Landsat missions, which observed Earth for more than three decades, on the fly.”

“A recent industry report estimates that total annual value of $2.19 billion, far exceeding the multi-year total cost of building, launching, and managing Landsat satellites and sensors. The value is derived from consumer use of the data. There is no inherent value in idle data.”

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

“Anything that’s historic, it’s got to be Landsat. In temporal depth, Landsat is really the only game in town.”

“NASA’s comprehensive study of Earth has provided much of the underlying understanding of current trends in the planet’s climate – including definitive measurements of rising sea levels, glacier retreat, ice sheet changes and the decline in the volume of the Arctic sea ice cap. Our satellites have provided global, long-term views of plant life on land and in the ocean. And our supercomputing power is allowing us to better understand how all the parts of th…