Text on screen: Landsat 9 data is available!
Jeff Masek: So it's really exciting to have Landsat 9 data being released for the first time. This is the culmination of, really, six or seven years of mission development. Everything we've seen, the data quality looks fantastic and, operationally, it's now collecting as much data as Landsat 8 does.
Del Jenstrom: Landsat is a partnership between NASA and the USGS, U.S. Geological Survey, and NASA builds the satellites and launches them and checks them out. We lead that aspect of it. USGS leads development of the ground system and mission operations.
Voice-over: And liftoff! Liftoff of an Atlas V rocket and Landsat 9.
Del: Well, after we launched on September 27th, 2021, we spent a little over three months checking out the satellite on orbit and the ground and operations system as well. I can’t be more proud of this team to bring this mission into its operational phase. The team has just built a wonderful satellite and wonderful operations and ground system. And the data that it produces is just spectacular.
[text on screen] Landsat 9 has joined Landsat 8 in orbit.
Jeff: So it means that we have two top quality observatories on orbit at the same time, which doubles the temporal frequency that people can get this really excellent data, now every eight days. And so for things like monitoring agriculture, monitoring water resources, anything where you really want that temporal repeat, it's going to be fantastic to have two of these, as I say, top quality observatories on orbit at the same time.
Chris Crawford: So what I'm extremely excited about is that now with Landsat 9’s exceptional calibration and its wide dynamic range, that's very comparable to Landsat 8. We're going to get data that has excellent performance at low signal levels, and then across really high signal levels where you have bright targets.
We know the data is well calibrated. Cause then we can monitor the instruments on orbit. And then we can actually run ground campaigns that take field instrumentation out and acquire data as the satellite’s flying over. These types of observations are really designed to verify and characterize and validate the quality of the data. So I guess what I would say is there have been a lot of people, working a lot of hours in order to be able to deliver this high-quality Landsat 9 science data, as quickly as possible.
Jeff: Everything we've seen, the data quality looks fantastic. We have better data quality in fact, than we did with Landsat 8. So I'm really excited to see what people are able to do with the data set now that it's out there in the public and available for science.
[music note]
[NASA logo] [USGS logo]
[text on screen]: Landsat is a joint program of NASA and USGS