EROS CalVal Center of Excellence

In a remote part of the Sahara Desert in Egypt, center pivot irrigation fields fill the landscape. Thanks to the Landsat archive, we can see how dramatically this area has changed over the last 35 years. But until the growth in irrigation, this part of the world hadn't changed much from a satellite's perspective. That's why Landsat calibration engineers originally chose it

Earth observation used to be the province of a handful of countries with satellite technology. Today, hundreds of satellites built all over the world are launched every year. This episode of Eyes on Earth talks about the explosive growth in the civilian and commercial remote sensing and EROS’ role in it.

Engineers and scientists from both Landsat and Sentinel missions are working together to calibrate observation data and validate its quality to improve the science using these resources.
 

On board Landsat 8 are two sensors that capture data about earth's surface. Here is an explanation of the instruments that capture every pixel.
 

Once the ground stations receive data from Landsat, there's still a lot of processing to make every pixel usable. Here's an overview of some of that work.
 

These infrared satellite images were collected on May 24, 2019 over the Washington, D.C. area.

The larger image comes from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) 16, a geostationary spacecraft at 22,500 miles. The near infrared image has a resolution of 1 kilometer per pixel. The smaller