Landsat 9 Media Briefing

For more than 50 years, NASA has been our eyes in space, helping us to better understand and explore our planet,

improve our lives, and safeguard us in the future.

The Landsat program represents the longest continuous global satellite record of the Earth's surface.

And of course, the Landsat's long-term record of our home planet, it allows us to track the changes, the impacts of climate change.

When Landsat 9 launches in September, it will build on the most advanced measurements made in the program's history.

Landsat 9 together with Landsat 8 and the European Sentinel satellites, they will allow scientists to study change in forest, crop,

and water resources.

This data is not only critical to farmers and scientists, it's free, it's openly available to those seeking solutions to global issues such as changing fresh water availability,

food security, and health.

Landsat 9 is one of many that benefit life for us here on terra firma.

I can't wait to see what we will learn next.

Good morning.

I'm Tyler Green from NASA's office of communications.

I am your host today to discuss the upcoming NASA, US Geological Survey, Landsat 9 mission.

Given the ongoing pandemic, all of our participants are joining us remotely from various locations.

We are trying a different format for this broadcast, with this particular platform combined with all remote participants from multiple locations, we have some technical limitations with live participation for Q and A.

For today, we are taking questions via email and social media during the broadcast, which we will read verbatim.

For nearly 50 years, Landsat satellites have captured data and images documenting Earth's changing landscapes.

Now, this joint mission between NASA and the US Geological Survey will continue to carry on the legacy of Landsat's critical role in monitoring land use and helping decision makers manage essential resources.

We are here today to count down the launch of the latest satellite in the series, Landsat 9, and to answer your questions later in the briefing.

On our panel today, we have Karen St. Germain, director of NASA's Earth Science Division, who will provide an overview of the Landsat program and how Earth observation can help manage resources.

Del Genstrom, NASA's Landsat 9 project manager, who will discuss the journey from design to the launch pad.

Jeff Masek, NASA's Landsat 9 project scientist, who will tell us about how Landsat views are changing Earth, tracking the impacts of climate change, and benefits to people.

David Applegate, associate director for natural hazards, exercising the delegated authority of the director from the US Geological Survey, who will discuss the wealth of data and possibilities with a continuous 50-year record from Landsat.

Birgit Peterson, geographer with the US Geological Survey, who will provide information about how Landsat data helps respond to wildfires.

And finally, Inbal Bekker-Zweifel, director of NASA Harvest, who will discuss the application of Landsat 9 data to observe and manage crops and the connection to agriculture and our food supply.

For anyone watching who would like to submit a question, please do so using the hashtag Landsat.

My colleague Jacob Richman is also receiving questions via email.

We will begin with NASA's Earth Science Division director, Karen St. Germain, joining us from NASA headquarters in Washington.

Karen, welcome.

Thanks so much, Tyler, and and welcome everyone to today's briefing.

We are, on behalf of team NASA, want to welcome you and let you know that we are really excited about the upcoming Landsat launch.

NASA is the US agency with end-to-end capability for collecting space-based Earth observations and delivering science and applications.

NASA's fleet of 23 satellites and sensors orbit the Earth orbiting the Earth today and another 10 are launching over the next two years to observe our planet's atmosphere, ocean,

land, and ice, substantially increasing our ability to see the Earth systems and how they work together.

These missions include those that we build for partner agencies here in the US and those that we build in partnership with space agencies around the world.

They include instruments on the International Space Station and satellites that range in size from a shoebox to a coach bus.

These satellites and those that came before them underpin much of what we understand today about our changing Earth climate.

And as we look to the future, we will build the systems that help us understand the distributed effects of that climate change so that we can model and predict it and ultimately inform decision makers from individuals to international bodies.

The measurements collected in space help us understand the science of how the Earth systems work together.

We look to answer questions like how weather impacts coastlines to crops, how melting ice is changing our oceans and atmosphere, and how carbon moves through the Earth system.

NASA is leading the world in openly sharing our data and science, and we're accelerating every effort possible to meet the demands for actionable and trusted information in support of both our domestic and international communities.

And we are days away from launching our ninth Landsat mission.

The Landsat program spans nearly 50 years and is a cornerstone of our understanding of Earth's surface.

Each satellite in the Landsat program has captured increasingly sophisticated data and imagery documenting Earth's changing landscapes and increasing our understanding of the planet on regional, national,

and global scales.

Landsat data informs a wide range of decisions related to managing crop health and water resources, and you'll hear more about that later on this morning.

These are critical decisions to mitigate global issues like regional famine or food scarcity in an era of accelerating climate change.

And this data is essential to global aid agencies, first responders here in the United States, policy makers at every level, major agricultural producers, and individual people from farmers and ranchers to urban planners.

Working with our sister agencies in the federal government, such as USGS and USDA, and with our private sector partners, like Google, NASA is delivering the most urgent, most comprehensive and applicable science needed to help inform critical decisions.

Now to hear more, I'll turn to my colleague, Del Genstrom, NASA's Landsat 9 project manager.

Del, over to you.

Thank you, Karen.

I'm at NASA's Mission Director Center at Vandenberg Space Force Base from where Landsat 9 will launch next month.

Now, the Landsat 9 project began in 2015, about 2 years after the launch of Landsat 8. And we were directed to build a satellite based on Landsat 8, but with some improvements.

Now, if you put the two satellites side by side, they would look very similar.

Like Landsat 8, we have two instruments.

We have the Thermal Infrared Sensor 2, which is we call TIRS 2, which is a two-band thermal imager, and we have the Operational Land Imager 2, OLI 2, that is a nine-band reflective imager from with spectral coverage from visible to short-wave infrared.

Now, the biggest improvement that we were directed to make with Landsat 8 is to make TIRS 2 a fully redundant instrument, which means it has better reliability.

It has backup systems

number of its We've also improved its optics to reduce some stray light that will provide more accurate thermal imagery.

Now, OLI 2 is effectively identical to the instrument on Landsat 8, but we are now going to bring down 14-bit imagery from the satellite instead of 12-bit imagery that we bring down from Landsat 8. And this improves the sensitivity of the imagery by 25% over what we get from Landsat 8,

which is important for analyzing darker Earth scenes such as coastal waters.

The spacecraft is a whole new generation of electronics and components and soft software, and the entire satellite is better protected against the space environment for things like orbital debris and static charge build up.

Landsat 9 will be operated from a brand new Mission Operations Center located at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, which was developed by and will be operated by our USGS partners, and it has been thoroughly tested with the satellite.

The performance of the satellite and the operations system is just excellent.

And the team, I just can't say enough about the the incredible job this team has done to bring this mission to launch in this pandemic time.

Landsat 9 will be the best Landsat satellite yet.

Now, I'd like to introduce Dr. Jeff Masek, the Landsat 9 project scientist.

All right, thanks, Del.

So, I'd like to speak a little bit about what Landsat does and what we do with all the images once we bring them back to Earth.

So, the key thing about Landsat is we collect multispectral images of Earth's land and coastal areas every day.

And by multispectral, we mean that Landsat sees not just the visible colors of light that our eyes see, but also into the infrared, including the long-wave IR, which is sensitive to surface temperature.

And these spectral bands allow for fingerprinting of materials and mapping Earth's land cover and its changes through time.

Uh, as Del said, we have two instruments on board.

We have OLI 2, which is a reflective band imager for the shorter wavelengths.

With OLI 2, we can see objects as small as 30 m or about the size of a baseball diamond.

We also have TIRS 2. That's our long-wave or temperature imager.

With that, we can see objects about 100 m in size, so the size of a football field.

These instruments are mounted to a satellite that's in a sun-synchronous orbit.

And so, it gets the same lighting conditions, the same illumination conditions on every orbit for consistency.

The data are collected in a series of swaths, each of which is 185 km wide, that provides us global land coverage every 16 days.

And of course, we launch into a constellation of two satellites, so Landsat 8 and 9 will be operating at the same time.

So, we get global land coverage every 8 days.

This frequency is really critical for assessing change both within a single year and between years.

In addition, the the observations are calibrated carefully to physical units of radiance, reflectance, and surface temperature.

So, what do we do with all of these images once we bring them back to the back to the ground?

I like to think of Landsat as something like a Swiss Army knife.

Out of one basic set of observations or measurements, we feed a whole range of different Earth Science applications.

In fact, Landsat remains our most widely cited land remote sensing system in the peer-reviewed literature.

There are about 1,600 peer-reviewed papers published each year that depend on Landsat.

Its key role is to track both human-induced and natural changes to the land environment to better support land management decision making.

And along the way, we're able to assemble and visualize an amazing history of how the planet has changed over the last half century.

So, some specific examples.

Uh, we're able to look at long-term trends in ecosystem and land cover.

For example, we're able to see natural disturbances that occur, fires, hurricanes, insect outbreaks, and then the long-term recovery of ecosystems that takes place for decades after that.

Birgit is going to give some examples of that with respect to fire in a couple of moments.

We're able to look specifically at climate and climate change impacts on ecosystems.

We've mapped areas of increased plant cover at high latitudes due to a warming climate.

We've also seen areas of vegetation decline in water-limited semi-arid environments.

We look at human land use change, including providing our best estimates for the area of tropical deforestation, the expansion of global agriculture, and the expansion of cities around the world.

Landsat's a key resource for agriculture and food security, and Inbal will talk a little bit more about this in a moment.

We can look at the types of crops being grown, we can measure their health, we can look at agricultural productivity.

We can also use the surface temperature measurements from TIRS and energy budget models to measure crop water consumption, which is an important application in the western US.

Finally, there are emerging applications that are extremely exciting.

In the cryospheric sciences, we can track the speed of glacier flows by automated feature tracking algorithms, which is a key component of ice sheet mass balance.

In the hydrospheric sciences, we can look at lake extent, surface water extent, and aquatic water quality.

For example, looking at algal blooms and getting early detection of those.

So, after 50 years, Landsat remains a core resource for land science and land management.

And in fact, new applications are emerging all the time.

So, with the launch of Landsat 9, the user community, the science community is absolutely looking forward to to this launch and for Landsat 9 to to join the Landsat constellation.

So, I'd like to now introduce Dr. David Applegate from the US Geological Survey.

David is the associate director for natural hazards, exercising the delegated authority of the director.

Great.

Thanks, Jeff.

I'm coming to you from USGS headquarters in Reston, Virginia.

Well, let's step back in time to the early 1960s, when the space race was at full throttle and millions of people around the world saw the first pictures of that big blue marble, Earth, from space.

It was awe-inspiring.

And for the US Geological Survey, it sparked the idea of a remote sensing satellite program to gather knowledge about the natural resources of our planet.

Since then, the USGS and NASA have partnered to build, launch, and operate Landsat satellite missions to gather and share Earth observation imagery, data, and information.

Over the past 50 years, Landsat has transformed our understanding of Earth and allows us to better monitor and respond to changes on our planet.

It's exciting to team up with NASA now on the development and launch of a new satellite that allows us to continue to observe our changing world.

It's a great feeling when we're this close to launch and see our hard work coming together for the big day.

Soon after launch, the operational work begins for the USGS.

Every 8 days, Landsat 8 and 9 together will image the entire Earth's surface.

As the satellites orbit 438 mi above Earth, the USGS works on the ground, managing satellite operations, calibration, data archiving, product generation, and data distribution.

We do this through the great work of our Earth Resources Observation and Science Center and its management of a global ground station network, which, with the addition of Landsat 9, will collect nearly 1,500 Landsat scenes each day,

about 50 million square kilometers, which is more than the landmasses of North and South America combined.

Not only does the USGS collect, process, and store the data, we also distribute the resulting information products to hundreds of thousands of users around the world.

Since 2008, when the USGS first made the Landsat archive freely and openly available to everyone, we've seen rapid growth in the number of downloads and uses of the data, such as regular monitoring of water use.

Last year, we surpassed 100 million Landsat image downloads, more than 40 petabytes of data.

Government and industry are beginning to use cloud computing to integrate large volumes of Landsat data into decision support tools.

The USGS and our many users can now quickly analyze broad geographic areas to better understand long-term trends in land surface change.

Like GPS and weather data, Landsat data are used every day to help us better understand our dynamic planet.

As the federal government's most widely used land observation data source, Landsat is an important tool to support forest loss and recovery analysis, climate change adaptation, and water resource management.

Landsat's economic value far surpasses its development and operations costs.

Now, even as we celebrate Landsat 9, we continue to look to the future.

Work has already begun on our follow-on mission with NASA, called Landsat Next, to continue the long-term Landsat data record.

Landsat Next will have major improvements over today's satellites to support even better science and public services.

Now, I'll turn it over to one of USGS's wonderful scientists, Dr. Birgit Peterson, who can tell you more about Landsat's value in her work.

Thank you, director.

Wildfire is a leading land management concern at national to global scales.

And the Landsat missions have long supported various needs within the wildfire science and management communities.

Critically, Landsat provides spatial and temporal data continuity, enabling the development of consistent products to inform wildfire management decisions.

These traits of continuity and consistency alleviate spatial data gaps and allow for meaningful comparisons of landscape-level features over space or monitoring over time and enable us to provide quality products to our stakeholders and partners with agencies such as the Department of Interior's Office of Wildland Fire,

the National Park Service, and the USDA Forest Service.

For example, Landsat provides key input data for deriving the suite of LANDFIRE vegetation, fuels, and disturbance products on a national scale, but also with sufficient spatial and spectral resolution to capture the distribution of key characteristics across the landscape,

as we see here, for the Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming, so that we can tell different vegetation types from one another, say for example, an aspen stand within a ponderosa pine forest.

Vegetation type and structure are related to fuels, thereby enabling the derivation of fuels maps.

These data products, in turn, are then used to feed other information needs, such as strategic planning, tactical response on fire incidents, and risk assessments.

Landsat is also an important data source for remotely characterizing burn severity.

In essence, we leverage the spectral difference between the pre- and post-fire images to capture changes in the landscape.

For example, the Leech Lake Fire burned over 50,000 acres in the Black Hills in December of 2017. A burn severity map was generated using Landsat data, and within the fire perimeter, we see areas of high, moderate, and low severity,

as well as unburned areas.

Products such as this give land managers information about where they might need to concentrate post-fire mitigation efforts, because burn severity is also linked to other post-fire impacts on the landscape, such as debris flow during a heavy rain event in a hilly area.

Furthermore, Landsat data are being combined with other remotely sensed data to provide even more detailed information about the impacts of fire here and other locations.

With these data products, we can monitor historical trends and look for shifts in size, severity, or frequency of fires.

We can also link these with other data to better understand drivers of these trends, such as drought.

Finally, Landsat's temporal record enables the monitoring of changes in the landscape and subsequent vegetation regeneration, as Jeff alluded to earlier.

For example, the Jasper Fire occurred in the summer of 2000, impacting over 80,000 acres in the Black Hills.

Using Landsat-derived products from the USGS's Land Change Monitoring, Assessment, and Projection Program, we monitor the area from before to almost 20 years after the fire.

The area was forested before the fire, but post-fire data from 1 year after shows significant removal of tree cover, especially in areas impacted by high burn severity.

And even almost 20 years later, this impact of the fire is visible in the data.

This type of information can help land managers know how well an area is regenerating after fire, how resilient vegetation might be to fire, and and transition of fuel load in the years after a fire.

In short, the wildfire community is looking forward to many more years of Landsat data.

And now I introduce Dr. Inbal Bekker-Zahavi, director of NASA Harvest.

Hi.

Thanks very much, Birgit.

Hi, everybody.

As we've already heard, Landsat data has played a critical role in agricultural monitoring over the past several decades, providing Earth Observations data that's been instrumental for understanding our agricultural systems.

Landsat 9 provides a critical extension of the satellite data record for monitoring almost every field continuously across the globe.

And these data support crucial agricultural decisions as we tackle one of the most pressing issues of this century, food security under a warming climate.

The first Landsat mission was designed with agricultural monitoring as a key application area.

As part of the response, I would appreciate if the speakers could describe if and how Landsat 9 and the Landsat system works with these other Earth Observing Systems and what are the relative strengths and weaknesses of Landsat 9 and the Landsat system and the other Earth Observing Systems.

Thanks so much, Tyler, and thanks Randy for the question.

So, to understand the Earth as a system, we feel the fleet of capabilities.

And and for each one of those satellites, those capabilities, there are key features, like what can the instruments see, how detailed, how accurate, and how often can they see it?

So, for Landsat, the strengths are, as Inbal referred some of them already this morning, the continuous record, which allows us to to really answer questions that play out over time,

but also the capabilities, the what Landsat can see, with the particular combination of wavelengths, the OLI instruments visible, near infrared, and short-wave infrared channels, and the TIRS 2 instrument thermal infrared channels,

we we combine the data from those channels to answer questions about things like crop health and fire damage and water quality, the kinds of things that that you've already heard a little bit about this morning.

And we can see those things at a pretty impressive level of detail.

But with a single Landsat satellite, we only get to refresh that view once every 16 days.

So, we can improve that refresh by combining the data from two Landsats, and when we further add in the data from the similar Sentinel 2A and 2B,

we can get that refresh down to 2 to 3 days.

So, in that sense, each Landsat satellite fits within a constellation and makes a unique contribution.

And

we only get to refresh that view once every 16 days.

So we can improve that refresh by combining the data from two Landsats and when we further add in the data from the similar Sentinel 2A and 2B,

we can get that refresh down to 2 to 3 days.

So in that sense, each Landsat satellite fits within a constellation and makes a unique contribution.

Another real strength of Landsat is it's designed to be extremely accurate and stable.

So it serves as a calibration standard for other satellites as well.

And also of course, it's an operational capability, so it's always there and we can depend on those observations.

We design our NASA satellite fleet to be complimentary.

So each satellite adds to the overall body of knowledge.

So for example, imagine combining the surface observations of Landsat with data from our gravity mission, which can assess whether an underground aquifer is full or depleted.

Or or our precipitation missions, which estimate how many how much precipitation is falling or our missions that can see how much water is stored in snow in the mountains.

So you can understand that Landsat plays a crucial anchoring role and it is complimented by the information we get from the rest of the NASA fleet and indeed from instruments and observations provided by our international partners around the world.

Jeff, is there anything you wanted to add to that answer?

No, I think you covered it very well, Karen.

I mean, I'll just say that you know, from the standpoint of Landsat working with Copernicus, working with Sentinel 2, you know, more data is is a win.

I I don't think I've ever had anybody at a conference come up to me and say, hey Jeff, you guys are just collecting way too much data.

Can you throw all that back a little bit?

Um, you know, what people really want actually is sort of this Landsat type data but at a daily resolution or daily time step.

So that you can look at crop phenology, how vegetation health changes from day to day, all the things that Inbal was talking about earlier.

And the way that we get that, you know, right now is by harmonizing the Landsat observations with Sentinel 2. And so the US and the European Union work closely together to make sure that that can happen.

And then I'll echo Karen's point as well about multi-modal observations, you know, that Landsat is a base on which you build.

I just looked at a paper recently in remote sensing of environment where people were combining GEDI laser altimetry with Landsat to create a interpolated global tree map the highest resolution that's ever been produced before.

And that of course can be a key input into looking at carbon stocks and their changes.

So you know, combining Landsat with other types of data both within NASA and internationally is is really key.

And so it's that complementarity that we we focus on.

Thank you, Jeff.

And thank you, Karen.

This next question is for David.

This is from Alex Goldman of connectivitybusiness.com.

Can you please share your thoughts on the complimentary role of free satellite observation data and data that is provided by commercial operators?

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, these new capabilities and commercial capabilities very much compliment NASA, compliment Landsat.

And we have lots of great partnerships both with the private sector as well as as we were just hearing with other nations as well.

Landsat has the capability to look across not just the visible spectrum but into the infrared and be able to to look at issues like heat and other aspects that really compliment the the visible capability of other satellites.

We heard about the calibration importance both that enables calibration with other satellites and also allows us to really seize that long record, temporal record and that comparability that's just so important.

The other thing that I think is so important about Landsat is the global mapping mission that it represents.

They routinely collect data on the entirety of the land surface.

And so you're providing the full picture of changes that are happening across the planet.

And that then allows the other satellites to to do that deeper dive, focus in, point down and and and again, very much a complimentary aspect.

And you know, just lastly, you know, Landsat is the most widely used satellite for the for the federal government just is wide range of uses and so having this you know, the operational nature that Karen was talking about is so important and having that long-term data set and that that ability to compare all of that makes Landsat a very valuable asset and one that very much compliments what

else is out there.

Thank you, Dave.

Karen, this next question will be for you.

This is from Jonathan Amos, BBC Science correspondent.

With so many private companies now providing optical and infrared imagery of Earth, what is the continued justification for big space agencies to keep flying expensive missions like satellite and its European counterpart Sentinel 2?

Wouldn't it be a better use of money to purchase the data as public goods from the private sector and then employ the money saved over to developing novel detectors and to plug the type of observation gap we saw with Grace and we will likely see following ICESat 2.

Thanks, Tyler.

And and again, thanks for the question.

And let me just just try to build a little bit on on David's answer to similar question, similar previous question.

We are really excited by the capabilities that we are seeing in the commercial Earth observation sector.

Those observations today are providing additional science to our additional observations to both the science and the operational communities.

They don't today replicate or replace the kind of data we collect with Landsat because they but they are generally they have complimentary strengths and and can can augment our our base of understanding.

As an example, commercial systems generally they can observe more often but they generally don't observe all the wavelengths we need to do the work we do with Landsat.

And and also those commercial systems often rely on systems like Landsat as an anchor for their calibration and stability.

So they're really they are complimentary, they're allowing us to do more but they they aren't replacement for those for the kinds of observations that we make with Landsat.

But as I said, we're really excited about those those the new science questions we're able to go after when we combine the data from a Landsat kind of system with with commercial observations.

Thanks.

Thank you, Karen.

This next question is for Del.

This is from Marcia Smith of spacepolicyonline.com.

Landsat 8 TIRS instrument suffered malfunctions once in orbit.

What were the root causes of those malfunctions?

Workarounds were found to get some data from TIRS but how much is the data degraded from what was expected at launch?

What changes were made in design, production and especially testing to ensure TIRS 2 does not experience a similar fate on Landsat 9?

All right, thank you for the question.

Um, yeah, shortly after launch of Landsat 8 while we were doing some lunar calibrations, we we looked at the moon on the on the month basis.

We realized that there was some stray light getting into the TIRS instrument.

Stray light is when you're looking in this direction but you're getting light in from off-axis.

So we realized there was a sneak optical path in the Landsat 8 TIRS design that was allowing this to happen.

Now, since that time USGS has implemented processing corrections to remove much of this excess stray light and and improve

the accuracy of the thermal imagery.

And so so that's helped to minimize the impact on TIRS products.

Now, on TIRS 2 we've just fixed the underlying problem.

We've added additional baffling to the telescope and then thoroughly tested it at the telescope level and instrument level.

And so so we're confident that we've beaten that problem for for Landsat 9. One other thing that's happened with Landsat 8 TIRS instrument, it was about a year and a half or more after launch,

I think, where we started seeing some current drifts in what's called the positioning encoder for the scene select mirror.

The TIRS instrument and the TIRS 2 instrument both have a mirror that points the field of view of the of the instrument either towards the Earth or towards some calibration targets.

And there's a positioning encoder that tells the instrument where the field of view is being pointed.

And we started seeing some current drifts in the electronics there of of the of the encoder.

And so after several months of investigation, we realized that there were some capacitors that were leaky in the electronics and that those capacitors had apparently come from a what is now known to be a bad lot of parts.

And so a workaround has been developed to slow the potential degradation of the positioning encoder.

The the findings were that this could get worse if you leave the encoder on.

And so USGS now routinely turns off the positioning encoder to minimize the degradation over time.

And so as a result, there there's no indications at this time that this encoder issue will shorten the life of the TIRS instrument.

For Landsat 9 and TIRS 2, we've we team selected a different encoder design and a different manufacturer.

So we hope we don't have that problem.

But it's important to note that neither the stray light issue nor the scene select mirror encoder issue has significantly affected the amount of TIRS data collected.

There is a greater latency for USGS to do some processing of the TIRS imagery because of the encoder problem.

But the both instruments still acquire global you know, the instruments acquire the instruments acquire global land image data every 16 days just as they were designed to do.

Thank you, Del.

This next question is for Inbal.

This one is on Landsat's role in agriculture as submitted in various forms by multiple Reddit users in a recent AMA ask me anything.

How can a farmer use NASA data analysis or understand it?

And what kind of data we need to look on?

What agricultural tools or use cases do you see benefiting the most from the upcoming Landsat 9 launch?

Thank you, Karen, for that question.

And and in fact, farmers data farmers can and and are using NASA data including Landsat data in combination with other data sets both from the ground and other satellites in many different ways.

And and one way for example to highlight is for scouting their fields.

So of course, farmers know their agricultural fields very well but they might have a lot of fields and as we know agriculture and crops develop and and change um very rapidly.

And so one of the things that satellite data provides is a view from above, right?

So a farmer can see all of his fields um continuously from from space and and that enables them for example to more effectively and efficiently manage their fields.

So one satellite data as we've heard are providing information not only in the visible what we can see but a lot beyond that.

And what that does is for example, if they've got a hotspot in an area that that is has a pest infestation for example, that they might not see that from the rotor.

It might take them two days until they're able to to reach that particular field.

That can give an an alert to a farmer to be able to then address just that one specific area in their in their field before that spreads out to their entire field.

Um, of course, satellite data are also very helpful in in managing different practices for example, when to harvest, when to plant, when to fertilize.

Um, and in addition, farmers have been using and and continue and will continue to improve their capabilities of using satellite data for example, to assess damage after a storm.

And as we know and as we've seen, there are more extreme weather events and and more severe weather events.

And so that becomes a really critical use as well of of the satellite data to be able to assess very rapidly what the impacts for example have have been.

In addition, satellite data are continuously being used also to not only assess overall crop conditions but also to estimate and and forecast crop yield.

So how much production will will be at the at the end of the season.

Um, but also to look at for example, long-term trends, right?

So how does a field look this year and and you know, are there particular hotspots in a field that that come through over multiple years or how does this year compare to to last year or to a year where I know I had a particular impact like from for example,

from from a drought.

So there are many different ways and and we're continuing to see a lot of innovation also in terms of how satellite data are being utilized directly by farmers to help to inform the management decisions.

And also looking at sustainable practices for example, and the impacts of those on productivity, on resilience as well.

And so they're helping to really start to create the evidence basis when farmers do adopt and sustainable practices and like different crop rotations like low till or no till, where does that work best under which conditions?

in terms of the second part of the question, uh what agricultural tools or use cases are do I see most benefiting from from the upcoming Landsat launch?

Um again, I think we see a lot of a large host of applications, but one of the main things that I think is really important to emphasize and and uh has already been emphasized is the in the temporal domain, again, um agricultural production crop develop very rapidly.

Having a look um and especially when we think about these constellations or or looking at the complementarity of of the Landsats with the Sentinels, that's affording us that will afford us almost daily um views of every or almost every field uh across the world.

And that's really important for us to be able to properly monitor um whether it's crop conditions, whether that's yields, whether that's mapping, where is all the corn being grown and when or the soybeans.

Um and again, that's important for a whole host of applications uh whether that's agricultural statistics that inform a lot of trade decisions, a lot of government decisions um to damage assessments to early warning.

Um we are seeing a lot more uptake of satellite data in the insurance sector and making that more effective and and efficient, which ultimately means that there's more agricultural insurance accessible and and available to farmers.

Um but of course, also if we think about the continuity that that Landsat 9 is going to afford us in in the um in the long term, looking and understanding at land use change, agricultural intensification and expansion, we know that that's um rapidly changed uh over the record already of the satellite data that we've seen in particular in in South America.

Um and so being able to continue to monitor our agricultural lands, keeping in mind that that we're going to have to be able to produce a lot more food with a lot less.

And so that's uh that gives us a really critical view and in in terms of how we continue to monitor our agricultural lands.

Thank you.

Thank you, Inbal.

And it looks like we are coming up on our last question.

This was submitted um not too long ago from a Twitter user at banselm1. What is the Landsat 9 launch window?

That question is best for Del.

The launch window is um um we're we're we're getting the since we moved the launch date, uh we we have to get an update to the specific moment that we're supposed to launch.

But uh nominally, it's about uh 11:11 a.m. Pacific time on the on the Pacific uh Pacific daylight time.

And then we have a 30-minute launch window each day.

And so the exact time the exact opening of that window may change a little bit if we have to go to a different day, but it's a 30-minute window every day.

Thank you, Del.

And thank you again to all of our panelists.

Thank you, everyone, for joining us today.

That concludes our briefing.

A replay of this broadcast will be available on our NASA YouTube channel as soon as possible.

For more information about Landsat 9, please visit nasa.gov/landsat9. Thank you.

From 438 mi above Earth's surface, the newest Landsat satellite will collect data so detailed, it can detect both natural and human caused changes to the landscape.

But what really makes Landsat unique is the half century of data, an unbroken chain of observations over five decades.

Let's take a look at how we got here.

1966. The US Geological Survey proposes a satellite to study Earth's landmasses.

But what would that look like?

Over the next few years, USGS and NASA researched their options.

1970. NASA gets the green light to build an Earth Resources Technology Satellite, an experiment to study and monitor our planet's land surface from space.

Launched in 72, this was the first digital data of Earth, repeated at regular intervals with geometric fidelity to allow comparison between observations.

This changed how we drew maps, tabulated agricultural production, and assessed damage after disasters.

In 1975, NASA launched a second satellite similar to the first.

Now they were collecting twice as much data.

With Landsat 3 replacing the aging original in 78, focus shifted to the advanced technology planned for the '80s.

The Thematic Mapper instrument, launched on Landsat 4 in 1982 and on its twin Landsat 5 in 84, was a major step forward.

Collecting seven different wavelengths at better ground resolution and with higher precision, this was the beating heart of the satellite and became the workhorse for a generation of scientists.

For the first time, Landsat data had three visible bands, red, green, and blue, allowing natural color composite images.

With the addition of short-wave infrared wavelengths, the data could better highlight flooded areas, mineral deposits, and burn scars from wildfires.

The thermal bands were also upgraded, allowing individual farm fields to be tracked.

The sixth Landsat was intended to be another big step forward, but it never reached orbit after launch in 1993. Plans in immediately began for Landsat 7, which would carry an even more improved sensor.

At the time, the Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus was the most stable Earth observation instrument ever sent into orbit.

And the calibration could be updated while in space.

For the first time, we had an instrument robust enough to collect lots of data, and we had a plan to thoroughly record the entire globe.

Landsat 7 was put to work mapping coral reefs and even produced the first high-resolution natural color map of remote Antarctica.

Improvements to the thermal bands on Landsat 7 allowed states and counties to gauge how much water was used by crops.

This helps them manage water resources efficiently.

An important milestone occurred in 2008, when the USGS made the data available to download for free.

Users were able to get the data they needed and not just what they could afford.

It really unlocked a ton of innovation and created about 2 billion dollars a year in economic benefits.

The modern era of Landsat observations began with the launch of Landsat 8 in 2013. Having a push-broom style sensor on Landsat 8 was a big improvement over the older scanning sensor.

The Landsat 8 ground system that USGS runs is capable of receiving a lot more data than before.

We're downloading over 725 scenes each day.

That just wasn't remotely possible until Landsat 8. The two European Sentinel 2 satellites were designed to mesh with Landsat, so that users can treat data from all the satellites as if it came from one single source.

Now we get observations every two or three days instead of every two weeks.

2021 is the launch of Landsat 9, the next step forward.

It will collect the best data ever recorded by a Landsat satellite while still integrating seamlessly with the extensive archive.

Since the early 1970s, Landsat satellites have allowed us to better manage our resources.

Landsat data has enabled countless innovations and will let us track the effects of climate change into the future.

As a Landsat satellite flies over the surface of the Earth, the instruments aboard the satellite are able to view a swath 185 km wide and collect images along that swath as the satellite proceeds uh through its orbit.

The spacecraft travels at approximately 4.7 mi per second.

The satellite travels from north to south while it's over the sunlit portion of the Earth and travels south to north over the dark side of the Earth.

One orbit takes about 99 min.

So that's about uh approximately 15 orbits in a 24-hour period.

The orbit's maintained such that after uh 16 days, the entire surface of the Earth has come within view of the Landsat instruments while sunlit.

And then on day 17, the first ground path is repeated, so we get to view the entire surface once every 16 days.