“While Landsat instruments are fundamentally just electro-optical transducers that ingest photons and eject a digital bit stream, this transduction relies upon the state of the art in numerous technologies including optics, precision electromechanics, detectors, advanced materials, cryogenics, and signal processing.”

“Continental scale applications of medium and high-resolution earth observation data are becoming increasingly important and feasible, driven largely by free and open access to the Landsat archive…the Landsat archive offers a temporal dimension for decades long retrospective analysis and ongoing monitoring capabilities.”

“We have brought it from the brink of death and back to life so many times over the last seven years. It’s just amazing what our flight operations team and our engineers are able to do with that spacecraft. It’s the oldest spacecraft of its type still functioning. We’ve certainly gotten our money’s worth out of it.”

“Because of Landsat’s global purview and long history, it has become a reference point for all Earth observation work and is considered the gold standard of natural resource satellite imagery.”

“The Landsat program has produced an unmatched record of observational coverage of Earth’s surface extending back to 1972, offering stunning satellite views of landscapes all over the world. This collaboration between NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has also yielded more than five decades of scientific discoveries as Earth’s climate has changed.”

“Landsat is really important because it gives us that time component. We can go back in time and see what an area let’s say a coastal zone or a mangrove forest has been like over time.”

“With its superhuman sight, and decades of archived imagery, Landsat provides us with the ability to see through time, to track the vegetal movement which is beyond our normal sight and to see it for what it really is: a titanic unfolding of active and intentional life.”

“When the archive was opened, there were more Landsat images outside it than in it. Many images were retained by the global network of receiving stations. An effort to consolidate these has added more than 3 million images to the repository since 2010; agreements are in place for a further 2 million to be ingested.”