NASA launched the Landsat 8 Earth-observing satellite just one year ago. Since then, it's captured land images globally, documenting the retreat of glaciers, floods, volcanic eruptions and other natural processes on our planet. Now, Landsat 8 is celebrating its launch birthday.
"Data produced by Landsate plays a vital role in managing America's natural resources and the industries and jobs that rely on those resources," said Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland in a news release. "It was Landsat that brought home the severity of Midwest floods in the 1990s, and it has helped identify periods of severe drought that were so devastating to our farmers and foresters. My hat goes off to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center that has played a key role in building each of the Landsat satellites, including Landsat 8, improving each satellite with the latest technology and help us better understand planet Earth."
In fact, the Landsat Program has provided data about Earth's landscape for over 40 years. The relatively new Landsat 8 satellite continues this tradition by sending data to Earth from orbit. It helps researchers track natural disasters and reveals processes such as urban expansion, crop irrigation and forest clear-cutting. This, in turn, can help scientists create climate models.
"The Landsat archive, reaching back across four decades, provides an unprecedented record of land-surface change," said Chris Scolese, NASA Goddard Director, in a news release. "The Landsat program's success is largely due to the great partnership between NASA and the USGS. Every day we are building and strengthening that partnership, which will undoubtedly contribute to the success of future missions."
A year after launch, Landsat 8 has continued to record the Earth's surface. It strikes an effective balance of introducing new technologies and capabilities while maintaining compatibility with the existing 41 years of Landsat data. Hopefully, this satellite will continue to provide researchers with many more years of data in the future.
Want to see some images from Landsat 8? You can check them out here.
