Landsat 9 is a partnership between NASA and the USGS and will continue the Landsat program’s critical role in monitoring, understanding and managing Earth’s land resources.
The Landsat 9 Ground System consists of three elements:
- The Landsat Multi-Satellite Operations Center (LMOC) at the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) is being designed and built by General Dynamics Mission Systems. Flight operations for both Landsat 9 and Landsat 8 will be conducted in the same building at GSFC. A Mission Operations Center (MOC) is where, on a daily basis, a Flight Operations Team (FOT) determines which set of scenes to collect while commanding and controlling the satellite, and also monitors the health and status of the satellite and its ground system.
- Ground Network Element (GNE), which includes the hardware, software, and networks necessary to communicate both command and telemetry data with the LMOC, but also mission data to the Data Processing and Archive System (DPAS) at the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center. The GNE relies on a variety of international ground stations to assist with those communications.
- Data Processing and Archive System (DPAS), which ingests, processes, distributes, and archive all Landsat 9 mission data.
The GCDR will involve a NASA Goddard System Review Team (Ground GSRT), who will evaluate the technical design and associated programmatics as per NASA GSFC STD-1001-A success criteria.
The GCDR is a major component of Phase C in the Landsat 9 mission development and lifecycle and will demonstrate the required functional and performance requirements to continue the Landsat 9 development process towards a December 2020 launch readiness date.
