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May 1, 2013 - Landsat 5 MSS 2012-2013 Data Available

By Landsat Missions

The workhorse of the Landsat 5 mission was the Thematic Mapper (TM) instrument. In November of 2011, the TM failed, and the MultiSpectral Scanner (MSS) instrument was brought back online a few months later.

The MSS had not acquired data for over a decade, due to the loss of Band 4 (and the continued success of the TM). While the MSS was acquiring data, the ground station was crafting new capabilities to ingest the raw instrument data. The data have been successfully ingested and are available from EarthExplorer.