Landsat Next Defined

Landsat Next Defined

June 29, 2023

Landsat Next is on the horizon—the new mission will not only ensure continuity of the longest space-based record of Earth’s land surface, it will fundamentally transform the breadth and depth of actionable information freely available to end users. Take a look at the new capabilities that will define the next Landsat mission.

Read More »
Landsat Next Defined

Landsat Next Defined

June 29, 2023

Landsat Next is on the horizon—the new mission will not only ensure continuity of the longest space-based record of Earth’s land surface, it will fundamentally transform the breadth and depth of actionable information freely available to end users. Take a look at the new capabilities that will define the next Landsat mission.

Read More »

“Within Australia, Earth Observation is so commonly used across all levels of government, industry and society that the minimum economic impact of Earth Observation from space-borne sensors alone is approximately $5.3 billion each year [Australian $; ~4.15B US$].”


— Australian Earth Observation Community Coordinating Group , Oct 2, 2017
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“Many of our customers’ work couldn’t be done without Landsat.”


— Jed Sundwall , Mar 19, 2015
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“Thanks to Landsat, we were able to dramatically improve our satellite base map in Google Earth and Google Maps on two separate occasions, first in 2013, and again in June 2016. Our most recent 15 meter-per-pixel global mosaic was made from over 1.5 million Landsat 7 and Landsat 8 images and forms the view of Earth you see across our mapping products for the first twelve zoom levels of the imagery basemap.”


— Chris Herwig, Google Earth and Earth Engine , Jul 28, 2017
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“There is a sensor in the Landsat satellite which measures the intensity of the reflected radiation back into space. What if we could use satellite imagery from the Landsat program to find fossils?”


— Robert Anemone , Oct 22, 2014
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“We knew that ice had been retreating from this region recently but now, thanks to a wealth of freely available satellite data, we know this has been occurring pervasively along the coastline for almost half a century.”


— Frazer Christie PhD student, School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh , Jun 2, 2016
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“The availability of continuous data streams of high quality and free of charge satellite observations such as the Sentinels of the European Copernicus program and the Landsat missions, in combination with the emergence of automated methods for large data processing and data analytics, and the democratization of computing costs, offer unprecedented opportunities to efficiently monitor the changes and trends in urban development globally.”


— Marc Paganini, ESA , Nov 11, 2021
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“The Landsat program relative to agriculture monitoring has been profound. The whole idea that Landsat could look at the condition of crops, the acreage of crops, seeing how they evolve, diseases… it just has been tremendously impactful for agriculture.”


— Vince Salomonson; Professor Emeritus, University of Utah | Landsat Project Scientist, 1977–1989 , Dec 15, 2022
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“Landsat’s thermal data is critical for tracking water use in the western United States, where rainfall can be short in supply and managing water resources is critical to ensuring a sustainable supply for farmers, cities, and natural ecosystems.”


— Bruce Cook, NASA Landsat 9 deputy project scientist , Aug 23, 2019
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“The Landsat series of satellites is a cornerstone of our Earth observing capability. The world relies on Landsat data to detect and measure land cover/land use change, the health of ecosystems, and water availability.”


— Charles Bolden, NASA Administrator , Mar 4, 2015
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“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
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“At Google, we use Landsat data on a daily basis.”


— Chris Herwig, Google Earth and Earth Engine , Jul 28, 2017
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“We use Landsat 8 to document glacier velocity patterns on a mountain-range-wide scale. Mapping glacier velocity is facilitated by Landsat’s high radiometric resolution and precise geolocation.”


— William Armstrong, glaciologist, University of Colorado at Boulder. , Dec 12, 2016
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“The Landsat data record has been key to the Intertidal Extents Model methodology. Having such an extensive and dense time series of data has enabled us to partition the data into discrete tidal stages, and still be able to deal with issues such as cloud and cloud shadow—that is particularly crucial when dealing with the different conditions we encounter across the continent.”


— Stephen Sagar, National Earth and Marine Observation Branch, Geoscience Australia and PI of a project to map the intertidal zone for all of Australia , May 25, 2017
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“Landsat has been extremely beneficial as it allowed us to frequently evaluate the movement of the shoreline based on data gleaned from one consistent source over the duration of the study period. Further, the continued use of Landsat will allow for ongoing monitoring of the coastline in this region to ensure that potential infrastructural improvements are sustainable based on projections of near-term climate change.”


— Ravi Darwin Sankar, geologist, University of Calgary , Dec 12, 2016
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“Agricultural engineer Jean-Francois Pekel and colleagues have created a kind of virtual time machine, showing past changes in surface water and providing a baseline for charting the changing future of our watery world. To achieve this feat, Pekel and colleagues used more than 3 million Landsat images of Earth’s lakes, wetlands, and rivers taken between 1984 and 2015.”


— High-Resolution Satellite Images Capture Stunning View of Earth's Changing Waters , Dec 9, 2016
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“Landsat is really important because it gives us that time component. We can go back in time and see what an area let’s say a coastal zone or a mangrove forest has been like over time.”


— Dr. Lola Fatoyinbo; Research Physical Scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center , Feb 14, 2022
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“Landsat, a joint program of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and NASA, offers an unparalleled record of our changing planet, with satellites that have been observing the Earth since 1972 to the present day.”


— Chris Herwig, Google Earth and Earth Engine , Jul 28, 2017
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“We hope to accelerate innovation in climate research, humanitarian relief, and disaster preparedness efforts around the world by making Landsat data readily available near our flexible computing resources.”


— Jed Sundwall , Mar 19, 2015
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“Landsat provides a global view of the the worlds alpine glaciers and enables us to track their retreat in ways that would be difficult without this important environmental time series.”


— Andrew Klein, Texas A & M University , Dec 14, 2016
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“The opening of the Landsat archive in 2008 was pivotal… We now have the best available map of disturbances for the United States.”


— Sean Healey, an ecologist with the USFS Rocky Mountain Research Station , Dec 23, 2019
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“We would not have been able to complete this research without Landsat’s free and open data policy.”


— Noel Gourmelen , Oct 28, 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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“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
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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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ABOUT LANDSAT

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.