December 19, 2014 - TIRS Calibration Reconfiguration

By Landsat Missions

At 10:34 am (CST) the configuration of the TIRS instrument on Landsat 8 was reconfigured due to detection of anomalous current levels associated with the scene select mirror encoder electronics.

Level-1 processing of TIRS and OLI data has been suspended until modified calibration parameter files are in place to enable processing to resume sometime late afternoon, December 19, 2014. From that point forward, the standard Level-1 products will contain valid OLI data but the cloud cover assessment scores and the associated attributes in the quality assurance band may be of degraded quality. The TIRS bands will consist of invalid data (zero-fill) from this point forward and until the anomalies associated with the encoder electronics are resolved. The processing of TIRS data with gain values of “zero” was considered the most expedient fix to ground processing with minimal impact on OLI processing and Level-1 product generation. Investigations will be ongoing and the instrument calibration status will be updated on Monday December 22, 2014.