May 7, 2004 - USGS Reduces Price for Landsat 7 Scenes

By Landsat Missions

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is reducing the price of Landsat 7 scenes with gaps in data resulting from a satellite anomaly in May of 2003.

Scenes that contain gaps in data will be reduced from $600 to $250. Scenes with the gaps filled in using data acquired prior to the anomaly will also be offered at a reduced price of $275 beginning May 10, 2004.

The new product being offered for $275 will have the gap areas filled in with Landsat 7 data acquired prior to the scan line corrector (SLC) failure at a similar time of the year. The two scenes are geometrically registered, and a histogram matching technique is applied to the fill pixels that provide the best-expected radiance values for the missing data.

The new product represents an effort by the USGS Landsat 7 Project at the EROS Data Center in Sioux Falls, South Dakota to increase the utility of the Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) data affected by the non-functional scan line corrector.

The USGS is continuing to research other methods of providing better merged data products and will continue to provide information resulting from this work as it becomes available.