Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

April 30, 2025

The USGS/NASA Calibration/Validation Team has recently discovered that over 44,000 Landsat 2 and Landsat 3 Multispectral Sensor (MSS) Level-1 products were processed in 2020 with a calibration parameter file (CPF) that contained incorrect gain/offset values.

The incorrect values cause a slightly noticeable difference in the brightness (known as the digital number - DN) values of the pixels within an affected product—Band 4 and Band 5, specifically. The band data display higher or lower DN values than they should, resulting from the coefficient applied during Level-1 processing. 

Media
Two images with different brightness values
These images display Band 4 from Landsat 3 MSS acquired February 20, 1982. The left is the current product; the right image displays the corrected image.  

A solution to rectify this issue and apply the correct CPF to the affected products has been identified. After Landsat systems are updated with the solution, Level-1 products will be reprocessed.  An new headline will be posted when the products are reprocessed. 

Please visit the Landsat Collection 2 Known Issues webpage to access a list of the affected scenes.

 

Return to all Landsat Headlines

Get Our News

These items are in the RSS feed format (Really Simple Syndication) based on categories such as topics, locations, and more. You can install an RSS reader browser extension, software, or use a third-party service to receive immediate news updates depending on the feed that you have added. If you click the feed links below, they may look strange because they are simply XML code. An RSS reader can easily read this code and push out a notification to you when something new is posted to our site.

Was this page helpful?