“Landsat has undoubtedly transformed our ability to understand urbanization processes and how cities expand and evolve… the multi-spectrality of Landsat, its relatively high spatial resolution, its revisit period, and especially the long observational record that made millions of scenes publicly available, make Landsat a key asset for the research community.”

“Without Landsat’s long record, studies like ours would be impossible to undertake, because we don’t have a time machine to go back to the 1970s and 1980s and see how Turkey’s glaciers were doing then. Using Landsat and commercial satellite data together, we can map glaciers with high accuracy. It’s a powerful combination for studying the Earth from space.”

“The rich history of Landsat (40+ years) enables not only change detection and trend analysis, but also provides a unique oppurtunity for hydrologic model calibration and validation as shown in this application.”

“The Landsat program doesn’t produce images like the ones of astronauts playing golf on the moon nor geologists scaling an erupting volcano, but it has created one of the most important scientific repositories of data ever made.”

“Landsat makes it possible to compare images over almost 5 decades and makes the role of climate change unmistakable in this incredibly beautiful mountainous part of Alaska.”

“With its superhuman sight, and decades of archived imagery, Landsat provides us with the ability to see through time, to track the vegetal movement which is beyond our normal sight and to see it for what it really is: a titanic unfolding of active and intentional life.”

“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.”

“The economic value of just one year of Landsat data far exceeds the multi-year total cost of building, launching, and managing Landsat satellites and sensors.”