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

Landsat 9 collecting data
Landsat 9—Continuing the Legacy
This new four-part video series shares the history of Landsat, how Landsat 9 works, how Landsat…
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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. [...]

"NASA’s comprehensive study of Earth has provided much of the underlying understanding of current trends in the planet’s climate – including definitive measurements of rising sea levels, glacier retreat, ice sheet changes and the decline in the volume of the Arctic sea ice cap. Our satellites have provided global, long-term views of plant life on land and in the ocean. And our supercomputing power is allowing us to better understand how all the parts of the Earth system work together and help us to predict how this could change."

— Charles Bolden, NASA Administrator, Dec 4, 2015

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“Tropical deforestation plays a big role in global climate cycles... without the transparency of Landsat satellite data is difficult to put your finger on changing trends.”

— Douglas Morton, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Feb 25, 2015

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“We are looking forward to new exciting data to complement Landsat observations and to collaborative research—especially because ESA followed USGS in its open data policy.”

— Garik Gutman, NASA Land Use / Land Cover Change program manager, Jun 30, 2015

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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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"By combining the 34-year record provided by Landsat [30 m] with climate data, we can now quantify relations between water availability and vegetation dynamics in ways that were not previously possible."

— Dr. Christine Albano, ecohydrologist at the Desert Research Institute, Dec 13, 2019

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“Population in 1972… was around 4 billion people. When we launched Landsat 8 there was 7 billion people on the surface of the planet. Due to those factors our land use and land cover has changed dramatically and continues to change and we use the information and the images from the Landsat satellites to understand the change, to study the trends, and to predict the future.”

— Jim Irons, Nov 26, 2014

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"This project would have been entirely impossible without the free and open-access data policy of the NASA/USGS Landsat-data archive."

— Frazer Christie, University of Edinburgh, Dec 16, 2016

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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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"Landsat enabled us to collect a multi-decadal record of the [river] reaches at almost annual resolution. By extending our record into the past we were able to examine how the reaches changed through time providing us with a truly invaluable dataset."

— Joshua Ahmed, Cardiff University, Dec 18, 2015

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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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