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Land Remote Sensing Program
The USGS is fostering the use of land remote sensing technology to meet local, national, and global challenges. |
VANDENBERG AFB, CA - Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar today joined NASA Administrator Charles F. Bolden, Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Water and Science Anne Castle, United States Geological Survey (USGS) Director Dr. Marcia McNutt and other Interior and NASA officials to launch the nation's newest Earth-observing satellite into space. Read More...
Landsat 5 successfully set the new Guinness World Records title for 'Longest-operating Earth observation satellite' as stated in an e-mail from Guinness World Records sent to NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Outliving its three-year design life, Landsat 5 delivered high-quality, global data of Earth's land surface for 28 years and 10 months. Read More...
NASA, in partnership with the U.S. Geological Survey, will launch the Nation's next Earth-observing satellite from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on February 11. Landsat images from space are not just pictures. They contain many layers of data collected at different points along the visible and invisible light spectrum. Consequently, Landsat images can show where vegetation is thriving and where it is stressed, where droughts are occurring, where wildland fire is a danger, and where erosion has altered coastlines or river courses. Read More...
Today the U.S. Geological Survey announced that Landsat 5 will be decommissioned over the coming months, bringing to a close the longest-operating Earth observing satellite mission in history. By any measure, the Landsat 5 mission has been an extraordinary success, providing unprecedented contributions to the global record of land change. The USGS has brought the aging satellite back from the brink of failure on several occasions, but the recent failure of a gyroscope has left no option but to end the mission.
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Landsat satellites provide decision makers with key information about the world's food, forests, water and how these and other land resources are being used. The Landsat Application Book, Landsat: Continuing to Improve Everyday Life (PDF, 101 Mb), explores a number of important everyday uses of Landsat that benefit us as a society. The launch of the LDCM satellite ensures that Landsat data will continue to enable these applications.
Global climate is changing. USGS is using remote sensing data to help develop new climate information products called Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) and Climate Data Records (CDRs). Together, USGS CDRs and ECVs can provide an authoritative basis for regional to continental scale identification of historical change, monitoring of current conditions, and predicting future scenarios. Find out more...
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Document Accessibility: Adobe Systems Incorporated has information about PDFs and the visually impaired. This information provides tools to help make PDF files accessible. These tools convert Adobe PDF documents into HTML or ASCII text, which then can be read by a number of common screen-reading programs that synthesize text as audible speech. In addition, an accessible version of Acrobat Reader 7.0 for Windows (English only), which contains support for screen readers, is available. These tools and the accessible reader may be obtained free from Adobe at Adobe Access.
U.S. Department of the Interior |
U.S. Geological Survey
URL: remotesensing.usgs.gov/index.php
Page Contact Information: Contact Land Remote Sensing
Page Last Modified: March 13, 2013