National Philharmonic playing with NASA imagery of the Sun in the background.

Exploring the Cosmos Through Imagery and Music

Awe-inspiring NASA visuals combined with the might of a live symphonic orchestra last week in “Cosmic Cycles,” a multimedia collaboration among the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the National Philharmonic, and composer Henry Dehlinger. A transformative project showcasing the beauty and power of the marriage between music and science.

Read More »
National Philharmonic playing with NASA imagery of the Sun in the background.

Exploring the Cosmos Through Imagery and Music

Awe-inspiring NASA visuals combined with the might of a live symphonic orchestra last week in “Cosmic Cycles,” a multimedia collaboration among the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the National Philharmonic, and composer Henry Dehlinger. A transformative project showcasing the beauty and power of the marriage between music and science.

Read More »

“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.”


“The relatively high spatial detail from Landsat allows differentiation of water use by crop type and individual farm field. At the moment, only Landsat can provide a consistent historical data going back to the 1980s that is long enough for trend analysis and investigate the relationships between management decisions and climatic drivers.”


“Landsat, with its five-decade record of robust collection, calibration and archiving, and its longstanding service as a global reference to cross-calibrate other missions, improves not only the quality of those systems but the overall quality of the global ‘system of systems’.”


“Landsat is, on its own merits, an extremely important capability for our country. It becomes all the more important when we overlay on top of that, the challenges of climate change and the fact that we are driving our climate to a place that we haven’t seen before, scientifically.”


“Landsat data are a key climate data source. That’s true for vegetation, for the carbon cycle, and it’s true for the cryosphere.”


“It’s a fundamental resource for the Australian community. It’s used at local government level, state government level, and national levels. It’s our most important Earth-observing satellite with out a question in my mind.”


“Thanks to its detailed spatial resolution, Landsat made the estimation of small reservoirs’ surface area possible.”


“It’s a fundamental resource for the Australian community. It’s used at local government level, state government level, and national levels. It’s our most important Earth-observing satellite with out a question in my mind.”


“Without Landsat it would be essentially impossible to get good Ground Control Point locations from other sources.”


“We can really say that we have achieved a level of remote sensing and Earth observation that we have never had before. We’re in the golden age right now with these satellites.”


“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?”


“Usage rocketed in 2008, when Landsat made its images free. More than a million images were downloaded in the first year, compared with a previous annual high of 25,000 images sold. More than 20 million images have been downloaded since the archive opened and the rate continues to increase.”


“Thanks to its detailed spatial resolution, Landsat made the estimation of small reservoirs’ surface area possible.”


“It’s hard to quantify the value of Landsat, but the last time USGS tried in 2017 they estimated that it produces $3.45B in value to society annually. There’s a second important conclusion buried in that study: if they tried charging for the data, that value would likely vanish in the blink of an eye.”


“Landsat 8 is part of a revolution of how much remote sensing can do to track the polar areas.”


“Timelapse in Google Earth is possible because of the commitment to open and accessible data through NASA and the United States Geological Survey’s Landsat program (the world’s first and longest-running civilian Earth observation program) and the European Union’s Copernicus program with its Sentinel satellites.”


“Understanding how this planet works and helping people make better, informed decisions is really what we’re about in Earth Science.”


“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.”


“Landsat is, on its own merits, an extremely important capability for our country. It becomes all the more important when we overlay on top of that, the challenges of climate change and the fact that we are driving our climate to a place that we haven’t seen before, scientifically.”


“Landsat has really become the gold standard of remote sensing from space. It’s provided an invaluable, indelible record of the recent history of our planet.”


“Since late 2008, when Landsat data was made available to all users free of charge, over 22 million Landsat scenes have been downloaded through the USGS-EROS website—and the rate of downloads is still increasing.”


“It’s a treasure trove.”


Landsat 9 bw
Landsat 9 bw
Landsat 9 bw

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.