Landsat 9 Solid State Recorder Bad Block Issue

By Landsat Missions

A known issue with the Landsat 9 Solid State Recorder (SSR) flash memory blocks identified during post-launch commissioning may occasionally result in data loss in some Landsat 9 scenes.

Although a rare event, this issue may impact a small number of frames of data, to several scenes, depending on where a SRR bad block issue occurs during a Landsat 9 interval.

In Landsat 9 scenes, the bad blocks appear as missing data (see images below) and are flagged in the metadata file as “designated fill”. The scene quality score (9 = best, 0 = worst) is reduced based on the amount of data loss. A quality score of 9 is guaranteed not to have bad blocks, and a quality score of 8 down to 1 indicates progressively larger amount of data loss.

Impacted data are ingested and processed if two-thirds of a scene is unaffected. This issue continues to be investigated.

Sources/Usage: Public Domain. View Media Details

Example of the Landsat 9 SSR bad block issue which illustrates 187 lost OLI-2 frames in the center of the scene. (Path 225 Row 64, acquired November 13, 2021).

Sources/Usage: Public Domain. View Media Details

Example of the Landsat 9 SSR bad block issue illustrating over 2,000 lost OLI-2 frames in the northern section of the image. (Path 087 Row 55, acquired November 3, 2021).