Landsat 9

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Recent Imagery

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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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Algae covering a beach

Spotting Brittany's 'Green Tides' from Space

'Green tides' of algae have wreaked havoc across the coastlines of Brittany, France, for half a century due to high levels of agricultural [...]
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. [...]
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. [...]

"The first step of ecosystem accounting is to actually map the dynamics of ecosystems over time."

— Celio De Sousa; NASA research scientist who uses Landsat data to create countrywide land cover maps, Mar 11, 2021

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"While Landsat instruments are fundamentally just electro-optical transducers that ingest photons and eject a digital bit stream, this transduction relies upon the state of the art in numerous technologies including optics, precision electromechanics, detectors, advanced materials, cryogenics, and signal processing."

— Aram Mika, Jul 31, 1997

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“The data policy for Landsat was a paradigm shift for the world. There is no doubt about it.”

— Barbara Ryan, Director of GEO, Jan 23, 2018

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“We looked at satellite images taken by the NASA-U.S. Geological Survey Landsat missions from 1972 and 1999 and the loss of forest and woodland cover along valleys and steep slopes was clear: eighty percent of the forests were gone. Through our analysis of Landsat forest change maps using GIS, we also calculated that the risk of landslide had increased fivefold during that time.”

— Lilian Pintea, VP of conservation science, Jane Goodal1 Institute, “, Sep 29, 2015

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“It’s a fantastic time to be a user of satellite data, if you’re in that moderate resolution domain this is amazing. The Sentinels and Landsat together is going to be really a game changer. It truly is.”

— David Roy, Professor at South Dakota State University’s Geospatial Sciences Center of Excellence, Feb 27, 2018

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“Landsat 8 can collect more than 700 images per day—14 times as much as in the 1980s.”

— Wulder Coops, Sep 3, 2014

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"Those are the Islands of the Four Mountains... The Landsat image shows them on June 8, 2013... One of the things I love about science is how it gives us perspective."

— Phil Plait, Jan 8, 2015

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“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.”

— Alan Belward, scientist at European Union’s Joint Research Center, Oct 18, 2017

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“Landsat represents a public good, Earth-observation infrastructure that allows everyone to study their respective land resources and their change over time.”

— Matt Hansen, Nov 3, 2016

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"Giant kelp forests are especially sensitive to environmental changes and have a history of undergoing abrupt, dramatic declines and increases in response to a variety of climatic and human-induced factors. The application of our remote sensing methods to the long-term (continuous since 1984), high frequency (~ once per month) global coverage of Landsat imagery is providing a unique opportunity for studying these dynamics over spatial and temporal scales that were previously impossible to examine. The recent decision to make Landsat data available to the public at no charge has greatly facilitated our use of this phenomenal resource for investigating giant kelp forests and is proving to be an invaluable tool in marine spatial planning and evaluation of recently established no-take marine reserves."

— Santa Barbara Coastal Long Term Ecological Research, Oct 15, 2014

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