• The city of Las Vegas, Nevada has undergone a massive growth spurt. An image series, created in honor of Landsat 5’s twenty-eighth birthday, shows the city sprawling across the desert over time.

Data from the expansion of Las Vegas was compiled from the fleet of Landsat satellites, and is shown as a false-color time-lapse from years of data.
The large red areas are actually green space, mostly golf courses and city parks. The images become a lot sharper around 1984, when new instrument designs improved the ability to resolve smaller parcels of land.
These images were created using reflected light from the near-infrared, red, and green portions of the electromagnetic spectrum (Landsat 5 TM bands 4,3,2 and Landsat 1–3 MSS bands 4,2,1).
Landsat data have been instrumental in increasing our understanding of forest health, storm damage, agricultural trends, urban growth, and many other ongoing changes to our land.
NASA and the U.S. Department of the Interior through the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) jointly manage Landsat, and the USGS preserves a 40-year archive of Landsat images with freely available data over the Internet. The next Landsat satellite, now known as the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) and later to be called Landsat 8, is scheduled for a launch in January 2013.
Contributor: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Related Links:
+ Download video of the expansion 
+ NASA’s Landsat Data Continuity Mission website
+ USGS’s Landsat website