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

Virginia Norwood
Virginia T. Norwood: The Mother of Landsat
We have Virginia Norwood to thank for the design and engineering that made the Landsat program…
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rail bird

Landsat Imagery Could Help an Endangered Bird

Landsat imagery together with the processing power of Google Earth Engine were used to model the best habitat for rails along the Lower [...]
Retreating Glaciers

Greenland’s Retreating Glaciers Could Impact Local Ecology

Many of the Greenland’s glaciers are retreating while also undergoing other physical changes. [...]
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. [...]

"In order to produce a rock outcrop map for the entire Antarctic continent, we required a freely available georeferenced multispectral dataset. The dataset needed to cover the high latitudes; be recently acquired; be of a high enough resolution to identify individual outcrops and geomorphological features; and have suitable coverage of the continent. On this basis, the Landsat 8 multispectral satellite data was chosen for analysis as no other platform met these requirements. It would not have been possible, or at least would have been prohibitively expensive, to carry out this study without Landsat data."

— Martin Black, British Antarctic Survey, Dec 17, 2015

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"Landsat 8, which launched into orbit in 2013, is the newest sensor in the USGS/NASA Landsat Program — superior to its predecessors in many ways. Landsat 8 captures images with greater detail, truer colors, and at an unprecedented frequency — capturing twice as many images as Landsat 7 does every day."

— Chris Herwig, Google Earth and Earth Engine, Jun 27, 2016

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"Landsat pays dividends not only to the prosperity of the global economy, but also to people and planet."

— Jay Neuner, Oct 4, 2018

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"Landsat is proof-positive of the value of Earth observation data, and particularly open access to Earth observation data."

— Jay Neuner, Oct 3, 2018

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"[T]he case for open data is more than proven by Landsat and Copernicus. Many innovative applications using these datasets are the dividends that benefit the taxpayer."

— Arup Dasgupta, Aug 5, 2019

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“I don’t think there’s any question about how important and how valuable MSS is.”

— Dr. Warren Cohen, U.S. Forest Service, Landsat Science Team former member, Apr 28, 2020

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“What we’re able to do now is track the flow of the world’s ice from pole to pole and on every continent.”

— Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, talking about the Landsat 8-based GoLIVE project, Dec 21, 2016

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“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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"Moving out on Landsat 9 is a high priority for NASA and USGS as part of a sustainable land imaging program that will serve the nation into the future as the current Landsat program has done for decades."

— John Grunsfeld, NASA associate administrator for science, Apr 16, 2015

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“Continuing the critical observations made by the Landsat satellites is important now and their value will only grow in the future, given the long term environmental changes we are seeing on planet Earth.”

— John Grunsfeld, NASA associate administrator for science, Apr 16, 2015

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