By Chris Burns, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
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For over 50 years, the Landsat program has provided the longest continuous satellite record of Earth’s land surface from space. Landsat 9, launched in 2021, is the latest mission in this remarkable legacy — building on decades of Earth observation with upgraded technology, including enhanced radiometric resolution, improved signal-to-noise performance, and polar night thermal imaging. Working in tandem with Landsat 8 to map the entire planet every eight days, Landsat 9’s data is being fused with the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 satellites to enable near-daily global observations, delivering sharper, more detailed observations that help scientists and communities monitor a changing planet.
VIDEO SCRIPT
It started over 50 years ago with an idea: A satellite, orbiting Earth, observing our planet’s surface, gathering data, day in, day out. That idea gave birth to the Landsat program, a partnership between NASA and the US Geological Survey, the longest continuous record of Earth’s land surface from space. Landsat 1’s launch in 1972 was the first link in a chain of 8 satellites, each one building upon the last. And today, Landsat 9 carries that legacy forward. Since its launch in 2021, Landsat 9 helping collect more scenes per day than any previous Landsat satellite mission. collects as many scenes per day as Landsats 5 & 7 combined. Working in tandem with Landsat 8, the pair now collect nearly 1,500 scenes daily, creating a complete map of the planet’s land surface every 8 days. It’s not just about scale — it’s about Landsat’s ability to revisit the same scene multiple times a month. With this pace of acquisitions, Landsat 9 helps track seasonal shifts in crops, the spread of wildfires, th …