“Landsat Next… will provide significantly improved data on global environment change, natural resource utilization, and dynamic landscapes; all information needed to inform future policy decisions and to drive groundbreaking advances for multiple scientific disciplines.”


“The success of a mission, and the societal benefits it creates, relies on many factors, including design, manufacture, launch, and operation of the sensor. However, it also includes data acquisition, accessibility, availability, and continuity, all of which are embodied by the Landsat program.”


“Landsat Next to me is an incredible mission… I really think of it as a game changer. The measurements provided to the community not only provide continuity with our current 52-year plus archive, but also drive new and emerging applications and science research. It’s very important to the American people and of course to science.” 


“You may have heard me say this before, but I firmly believe there are few topics more fundamental to study than the workings of our planet. The earth sciences aim to unravel how the lithosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere operate—and how they operate together. It is a science of synthesis. And it’s one that needs to move forward, both because of the great service the earth sciences perform for society and the understanding of world-shaping processes that they advance.”


“It’s really a new era for Landsat, in that we’re going to have two observatories with very similar capabilities and very similar—if not identical—performances operating together. And this is going to provide more data to the Landsat mission than we’ve ever had before.”


“The ability to see what was happening through time through Landsat imagery helped us tremendously… from sea-level, we hadn’t seen the signs of retreat that the Landsat imagery showed us—the diminishing of the glaciers, of the size and mass of the glaciers. It rocked our world. It truly changed the narrative of interpretation in Glacier Bay. The story that we shared with visitors about glaciers in Glacier Bay was transformed by that information.”


“This is really an exciting time for Landsat polar science, a new era so to speak. With Landsat Next on the horizon, the LEAP special request program and its observations of Earth’s polar regions—and the global cryospheric state more broadly—can only be expected to grow in impact and relevance.”


“Landsat 5 is kind of like the (Energizer) bunny — it just keeps running and running.”


“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.”


“The archive is just going to continue to yield good information, good science, better management, reduced costs… The biggest contribution of Landsat will be that archive.”


“The USGS Landsat Surface Reflectance products have revolutionized human-scale biophysical studies that require consistent and atmospherically corrected products.”


“Landsat 5 is kind of like the (Energizer) bunny — it just keeps running and running.”


“It is a game changer for people who want to know the impact of a management action on particular piece of land, or how a dam affected the downstream area.”


“For our main aim of quantifying surface water extent dynamics during a period of high hydro-climatic variability, Landsat was the only satellite archive to meet all our criteria.”


“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.”


“Because of Landsat’s global coverage and long history, it has become a reference point for all Earth observation work and is considered the gold standard of natural resource satellite imagery.”


“Assessing land cover change, especially the dynamics of smaller water bodies, requires spatial resolution and temporal frequency that are currently only available from the Landsat program. The continuation of the Landsat program will increase the data quantity available for analysis.”


“I have really appreciated being able to use Landsat data as a ‘time machine’ to understand our changing environment.”


“Many of our customers’ work couldn’t be done without Landsat.”


“A growing archive of Landsat images allow us to see how quickly icesheets are changing.”


“The Landsat archives were the foundation of our study. Landsat unlocks the previous three decades’ of global river changes by recording these ‘natural experiments.’ We were able to quantify the degree of accelerated migration and channel widening caused by 13 cutoff events, estimate the amount of sediment released into the channel due to the cutoffs, and infer the physical processes driving river response to cutoffs.”


“The archive is just going to continue to yield good information, good science, better management, reduced costs… The biggest contribution of Landsat will be that archive.”


“The tracking of over-irrigated areas for targeting irrigation advisory texts was completely dependent on Landsat TIR data.”


Landsat 9 bw
Landsat 9 bw
Landsat 9 bw

The Landsat program consists of a series of Earth-observing satellite missions jointly managed by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Since 1972, Landsat satellites have continuously acquired images of the Earth’s land surface and provided an uninterrupted data archive to assist land managers, planners, and policymakers in making more informed decisions about natural resources and the environment.