In an era when receipt of images from Earth-orbiting satellites is “routine”, it’s hard to recall that a few short decades ago this wasn’t the case. Landsat has stood at the forefront of space-based Earth observation, and has been the trailblazer for land remote sensing as it’s known today.

The Landsat Legacy Project, an effort to document Landsat’s evolution, began in 2004. Since then, NASA, together with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), has gathered over 800 documents, pictures, and videos related to the Landsat program, including a series of interviews conducted with over 50 Landsat veterans—all of which have been assembled into a digital archive by the NASA Goddard library.

Download video: The Landsat Legacy Project, Nov. 2011 (~350 Mb)

+ “Chronicling the Landsat Legacy,” The Earth Observer [pdf]