19 Facts About Landsat program

Landsat program is the longest-running enterprise for acquisition of satellite imagery of Earth.

The images, archived in the United States and at Landsat receiving stations around the world, are a unique resource for global change research and applications in agriculture, cartography, geology, forestry, regional planning, surveillance and education, and can be viewed through the U S Geological Survey "EarthExplorer" website.

Landsat program images are usually divided into scenes for easy downloading.

In 1965, William T Pecora, the then director of the United States Geological Survey, proposed the idea of a remote sensing satellite program to gather facts about the natural resources of our planet.

Pecora stated that the Landsat program was “conceived in 1966 largely as a direct result of the demonstrated utility of the Mercury and Gemini orbital photography to Earth resource studies.

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So, when Landsat program 1 was proposed, it met with intense opposition from the Bureau of Budget and those who argued high-altitude aircraft would be the fiscally responsible choice for Earth remote sensing.

Remarkably, within only two years, Landsat program 1 was launched, heralding a new age of remote sensing of land from space.

In 1989, this transition had not been fully completed when NOAA's funding for the Landsat program was due to run out and NOAA directed that Landsat 4 and Landsat 5 be shut down.

Again in 1990 and 1991, Congress provided only half of the year's funding to NOAA, requesting that agencies that used Landsat program data provide the funding for the other six months of the upcoming year.

Landsat program 6 was finally launched on 5 October 1993, but was lost in a launch failure.

Value of the Landsat program was recognized by Congress in October 1992 when it passed the Land Remote Sensing Policy Act authorizing the procurement of Landsat 7 and assuring the continued availability of Landsat digital data and images, at the lowest possible cost, to traditional and new users of the data.

Landsat program 8 uses two instruments, the Operational Land Imager for optical bands and the Thermal Infrared Sensor for thermal bands.

Landsat program imagery is coarse in spatial resolution compared to using other remote sensing methods, such as imagery from airplanes.

Landsat program data provides information that allows scientists to predict the distribution of species, as well as detecting both naturally occurring and human-generated changes over a greater scale than traditional data from field work.

The different spectral bands used on satellites in the Landsat program provide many applications, ranging from ecology to geopolitical matters.

Landsat program imagery has been used as a record to quantify the amount of water loss and the changes to the shoreline.

Landsat program imagery was used for the area estimation, and it helped determine the reasons why the fire spread so quickly.

Landsat program imagery gives a time-lapse like series of images of development.

Timelapse of the Thermal Infrared Sensor instrument for Landsat program 8 being cleaned, bagged, and packed to ship to Orbital Sciences Corp, where TIRS will be integrated with the spacecraft.