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. [...]

“With Landsat we can see temperature of individual fields and how it varies from field-to-field. The temperature of the land surface gives us a good indication of how rapidly water is evaporating off that surface. And this is really important for knowing how healthy the crops are and also for supplying information for irrigators: how much water was used last week and how much do they need to replenish in the current week to keep the crops healthy.”

— Martha Anderson, U.S. Department of Agriculture and Landsat Science Team member, Feb 5, 2018

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“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

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"The long time span covered by the Landsat scenes allows us to determine long-term flow velocity trends. The high temporal resolution lets us analyze seasonal flow velocity variations of numerous outlet glaciers...The monitoring system provides a powerful tool to examine the flow velocity pattern throughout time and space, and we have detected an acceleration pattern for a number of outlet glaciers."

— M. Scheinert Scheinert, Ralf Rosenau, and Benjamin Ebermann, Dec 29, 2016

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“We had to push the spatial resolution because we're interested in humans.”

— Matt Hansen, on why he turned to Landsat for the Global Forest Watch project, Oct 4, 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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“Last year the White House found that GPS, weather satellites, and Landsat are the three most critical types of Earth-orbiting assets for civil applications, because they’re used by many economic sectors and fields of research.”

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

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“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

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"Even though I have a book coming out about the Moon Landing, I'll say it: Landsat is likely the greatest, most impactful, yet under-appreciated, accomplishment of the entire space age."

— Dr. Danny Bednar, Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, Western University, Jan 22, 2020

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"Landsat 8 has been instrumental in monitoring smoke plumes as they spread across the Ninewa plains."

— Wim Zwijnenburg, Humanitarian Disarmament Project Leader for PAX, Oct 25, 2016

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"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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