[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 see that the data quality looks fantastic and, 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 5 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 Masek: And so it means that we have really two top quality
observatories on orbit at the same time, which
doubles the temporal frequency that people can,
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
as the satellite's flying over.
These types of observations are really designed
to verify and characterize and validate the quality of the data.
And so I guess what I would say is that
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 Masek: 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 dataset
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