"If you really want a long history of understanding any process on Earth, Landsat is where you should go."
-Tasso Azevedo, MapBiomas Initiative
NASA, USGS Release First Landsat 9 Images
Landsat 9's first light images provide a preview of how the mission will help people manage vital natural resources and understand the impacts of climate change.
Mapping Our Human Footprint from Space
The World Settlement Footprint is the world's most comprehensive dataset on human settlement.
A Changed Landscape on La Palma
Nighttime Images Detail Kentucky Blackout
Disappearing Lake Tuz
"In order to produce a rock outcrop map for the entire Antarctic continent, we required a freely available georeferenced multispectral dataset. The dataset needed to cover the high latitudes; be recently acquired; be of a high enough resolution to identify individual outcrops and geomorphological features; and have suitable coverage of the continent. On this basis, the Landsat 8 multispectral satellite data was chosen for analysis as no other platform met these requirements. It would not ha…
— Martin Black, British Antarctic Survey , Dec 17, 2015
+ more quotes
"Landsat offers a unique continuous record of the surface of the Greenland Ice Sheet over the last 40 years, no other mission would have been able to provide observations of ice velocity change over such a long time period."
— Noel Gourmelen , Oct 28, 2015
"Since the first in the line of Landsat craft entered orbit in 1972, this satellite program has proven valuable to the economy of the United States."
— AIA white paper , Apr 20, 2016
"The Landsat collection 1 datasets represent a milestone in remote sensing science, with comparatively stable radiometric calibration and atmospheric correction."
— Bruce Cook, NASA Landsat 9 deputy project scientist , Jul 1, 2019
"The relatively high spatial detail from Landsat allows differentiation of water use by crop type and individual farm field. At the moment, only Landsat can provide a consistent historical data going back to the 1980s that is long enough for trend analysis and investigate the relationships between management decisions and climatic drivers."
— Gabriel Senay, Research Physical Scientist with USGS EROS , Dec 12, 2016
"A growing archive of Landsat images allow us to see how quickly icesheets are changing."
— Ted Scambos, Senior Research Scientist, University of Colorado Earth Science Observation Center , Sep 16, 2021
"Landsat is the crown jewel of Earth Observation datasets—unique 40+ year archive."
— Steven Brumby, co-founder Descartes Labs , Jun 14, 2017
"The Landsat archives were the foundation of our study. Landsat unlocks the previous three decades' of global river changes by recording these 'natural experiments.' We were able to quantify the degree of accelerated migration and channel widening caused by 13 cutoff events, estimate the amount of sediment released into the channel due to the cutoffs, and infer the physical processes driving river response to cutoffs."
— Jon Schwenk, University of Minnesota Twin Cities , Dec 16, 2016
"The USGS's Landsat mission has an incredible 40-year record of the planet's changing landscape, with virtually every spot imaged every eight days. It's an incredible scientific asset."
— Betsy Mason , Oct 14, 2014
"Work has begun on the next mission, Landsat 9, with launch scheduled for late 2020. Plans for the next generation of Landsat are also underway, with a series of studies leading to a decision on the Landsat 10 and beyond architecture in 2018."
— Timothy Newman, USGS Land Remote Sensing Program Coordinator , Jul 18, 2016
"Our Landsat-based insect atlas facilitates comparisons across space, time, and insect agents that have not been possible to date."
— Garrett Meigs et al. , Mar 1, 2015
"The community was very vocal regarding the value of a free and open data policy."
— Frank Avila, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and National Geospatial Advisory Committee member , Jun 12, 2019
"Landsat is an invaluable tool for people working in our field of community wildfire safety."
— Zeke Lunder, a pyrogeographer and founder of Deer Creek GIS , Feb 19, 2019
"Landsat 8 is an incredible resource for global change research and has been used in a diverse array of scientific endeavors including the monitoring of deforestation, population growth, and glacier recession."
— Bruce Tannenbaum , Mar 19, 2015
"The Landsat program doesn't produce images like the ones of astronauts playing golf on the moon nor geologists scaling an erupting volcano, but it has created one of the most important scientific repositories of data ever made."
— Robinson Meyer , Apr 16, 2015
"Assessing land cover change, especially the dynamics of smaller water bodies, requires spatial resolution and temporal frequency that are currently only available from the Landsat program. The continuation of the Landsat program will increase the data quantity available for analysis."
— Jennifer Rover, USGS , Dec 14, 2015
"Our mapping techniques build on the historical Landsat record to provide highly needed information on regional scale and this helps in evaluating subtle changes in mangroves over a long period of time (trends) and to detect sudden changes due to natural catastrophes or dramatic anthropogenic impacts… [and] Thanks to the increased abundance of Landsat satellite images, it is becoming progressively easier to collect available images of mangrove habitats captured at low tide and high tide."
— Hesham El-Askary, Center of Excellence in Earth Systems Modeling & Observations and Schmid College of Science and Technology, Chapman University , May 9, 2019
"It is a game changer for people who want to know the impact of a management action on particular piece of land, or how a dam affected the downstream area."
— Dr. Virginia Burkett, Chief Scientist, Climate and Land Use Change (CLU), USGS, describing the new Landsat Analysis Ready Data , May 11, 2018
"It's being able to go back in time for the same location, with the same program, that's given us a tremendous amount of really valuable information… With Landsat we can do that because the archive is so rich."
— Alan Belward, scientist at European Union's Joint Research Center , Oct 18, 2017
"The advent of Landsat data enabled an unparalleled increase in our understanding of the Earth system."
— Randolph Wynne, Landsat Science Team , Dec 21, 2014
"Landsat has been extremely beneficial as it allowed us to frequently evaluate the movement of the shoreline based on data gleaned from one consistent source over the duration of the study period. Further, the continued use of Landsat will allow for ongoing monitoring of the coastline in this region to ensure that potential infrastructural improvements are sustainable based on projections of near-term climate change."
— Ravi Darwin Sankar, geologist, University of Calgary , Dec 12, 2016
"Landsat 8 can collect more than 700 images per day—14 times as much as in the 1980s."
— Wulder Coops , Sep 4, 2014
"Nothing is harder to image than the past. It is imperative that all Landsat observations are archived and made available to users."
— Wulder et al., 2015 , Aug 23, 2016
"Landsat provides wide coverage of the Himalayas for years with spatial and spectral quality, especially now, with Landsat 8 that has enhanced spectral resolution, which enables the monitoring of glacier state."
— Ramesh P. Singh, Chapman University , Dec 12, 2016
ABOUT LANDSAT
The NASA/USGS Landsat Program provides the longest continuous space-based record of Earth's land in existence. Landsat data give us information essential for making informed decisions about Earth's resources and environment.