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USGS2021

Landsat 9: Ready for Launch

Landsat 9 is in its final preparations for launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base on 16 September 2021. It has completed its environmental testing at Northrop Grumman Space (NGSP) in Gilbert, Arizona and has been transported to its California launch site. It will be launched into a 705 km orbit replacing Landsat 7 to provide 8-day Earth land mass coverage in concert with Landsat 8. Landsat 8 carries the first Operational Land Imager (OLI) and the Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS); Landsat 9 carries the second of each: OLI-2 and TIRS-2. Once launched it will undergo a 90-day activation, checkout, characterization and calibration, a.k.a. commissioning phase before transitioning to operations. For a several-day period during this commissioning phase, Landsat 9 will under-fly Landsat 8, allowing near simultaneous data collection by both sensors of common Earth targets. These data will be used to compare the radiometric calibrations of the instruments and allow for adjustments of processing parameters to provide more consistent data products.

Conference Paper↗

USGS2018

Analysis ready data: Enabling analysis of the Landsat archive

Data that have been processed to allow analysis with a minimum of additional user effort are often referred to as Analysis Ready Data (ARD). The ability to perform large scale Landsat analysis relies on the ability to access observations that are geometrically and radiometrically consistent, and have had non-target features (clouds) and poor quality observations flagged so that they can be excluded. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) has processed all of the Landsat 4 and 5 Thematic Mapper (TM), Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+), Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) and Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) archive over the conterminous United States (CONUS), Alaska, and Hawaii, into Landsat ARD. The ARD are available to significantly reduce the burden of pre-processing on users of Landsat data. Provision of pre-prepared ARD is intended to make it easier for users to produce Landsat-based maps of land cover and land-cover change and other derived geophysical and biophysical products. The ARD are provided as tiled, georegistered, top of atmosphere and atmospherically corrected products defined in a common equal area projection, accompanied by spatially explicit quality assessment information, and appropriate metadata to enable further processing while retaining traceability of data provenance.

Remote Sensing↗