16 Facts About Landsat

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 images are usually divided into scenes for easy downloading.

So, when Landsat 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 1 was launched, heralding a new age of remote sensing of land from space.

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

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

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

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

Landsat 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 imagery provides one of the longest uninterrupted time series available from any single remote sensing program, spanning from 1972 to present.

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

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

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

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