Landsat Missions

Project Descriptions

The Landsat Project is a major mission within the USGS Land Remote Sensing (LRS) Program. The LRS Program encompasses three major components: Remote Sensing Missions and Data Acquisition, Long-term Data Preservation and Access, and Remote Sensing Research and Data Utilization. For more information about the LRS Program, view the USGS LRS Fact Sheet - .pdf (562 KB)

Landsat represents the world's longest continuously acquired collection of space-based land remote sensing data. The Landsat Project is a joint initiative of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) designed to gather Earth resource data from space. NASA developed and launched the spacecrafts. The USGS handles the operations, maintenance, and the management of all ground data reception, processing, archiving, product generation, and distribution. The 35-year record of images provides a unique resource for people who work in agriculture, geology, forestry, regional planning, education, mapping, and global change research. For more information about the Landsat Project, view the Landsat Fact Sheet - .pdf (5.36 MB).

Currently, NASA and USGS are engaged in a partnership to continue to acquire Landsat-quality data that meet both NASA and USGS scientific and operational requirements for observing land use and land change. This activity is the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM). A fundamental goal of the Landsat and LDCM Projects is continuity of data characteristics and accessibility for data users. For more information about the LDCM Project, view the LDCM Fact Sheet - .pdf (1.13 MB).

Landsat data have been used by government, commercial, industrial, civilian, military, and educational communities throughout the United States and worldwide. The data support a wide range of applications in such areas as global change research, agriculture, forestry, geology, resource management, geography, mapping, water quality, and oceanography.

The consistency of Landsat data over three decades of acquisition offers opportunities to compare land cover changes over time. Landsat images are also invaluable for emergency response and disaster relief. Advances made in data reception and processing permit rapid access to imagery in times of natural or human-made disaster. Within hours of data acquisition, the USGS Center for Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, provides relief organizations worldwide with satellite images for disaster response, as well as image-derived products that incorporate information on population density, elevation, and other relevant topics.

In an effort to gather Landsat's technical documentation, the NASA Landsat Project Science Office (LPSO) is teaming with the U.S. Geological Survey and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Library to create an archive of essential Landsat documentation. The archive, dubbed the Landsat Legacy, will house technical-, policy- and science-related documents with an emphasis on internal technical papers. For more information about the Landsat Legacy project, please visit the Legacy registry site.

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Page Last Modified: May 16, 2008