Landsat Missions

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center is pleased to announce the December release of Landsat Collection 2, the most significant upgrade to the Landsat archive to date.

A new, freely-available digital elevation dataset born of international collaboration has the potential to improve the quality of Landsat and Sentinel satellite data, bolster interoperability across a wide range of satellite systems, and will offer immediate benefits to elevation modeling both within and outside the USGS.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that scientists and engineers are constantly pushing the envelope to improve remote-sensing data and their utility, says Matt Hansen, a Landsat Science Team (LST) member and professor in the Department of Geographical Sciences at the University of Maryland in College Park.

The next full moon will come on September 2, 2020. And when you look up to see it, so will Landsat 8. As probably the most accurate Earth imaging satellite system, Landsat has multiple ways of calibrating data to ensure its accuracy and interoperability with other satellites. One of the strategies the calibration engineers use is lunar calibration.

The U.S. Geological Survey’s Landsat 7 Flight Operations Team achieved nothing less than a major milestone in mid-July of 2020. For eight straight years, they had not one operator error. Not one.

The U.S. Geological Survey took a bold step toward documenting change across the landscape with the launch of the first Landsat satellite in 1972. Since then, the orbiters have collected nearly five decades of imagery.

Remote sensing is not an especially recognized scientific discipline, at least in comparison to fields like biology, chemistry, or medicine.

USGS Fire Science is fundamental to understanding the causes, consequences, and benefits of wildfire and helps prevent and manage larger, catastrophic events. USGS scientists and programs provide information and develop tools that are widely used by stakeholders to make decisions before, during, and after wildfires across the nation.

The Landsat satellites were designed to detect landscape changes over time. However, sometimes what Landsat needs to see on the Earth’s surface is no change at all.

Australia’s historic fires, the Black Summer fires, raged from September 2019 into February of 2020, and weren’t fully extinguished until this past March.

More than a decade ago, Tom Loveland sat down to sketch out a few thoughts on land change and the Landsat archive.

The archive was and remains rich with history, adding new observations of the entire planet every eight days. But at that point, Landsat-based land change research was about comparing points in time – this year versus five years ago, to 10 years ago, and so on.