Landsat Spots the ISS

  • Released Thursday, August 25, 2016
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ISS passing through the various bands of the Landsat 8 OLI sensor

ISS passing through the various bands of the Landsat 8 OLI sensor

The International Space Station (ISS) flies in an orbit that keeps it about 400 kilometers (250 miles) above the surface of the Earth—roughly the distance between New York and Boston. Meanwhile, Landsat 8, an Earth-observing satellite, cruises at an average altitude of 705 kilometers (438 miles). That means Landsat 8’s Operational Land Imager (OLI) gets a unique view of the Space Station when the orbits of the two spacecraft occasionally align.

On June 19, 2016, they did just that. Landsat 8 acquired images of the ISS amidst a background of clouds over the state of Odisha in eastern India. The images shown here are comprised of nine separate images collected just fractions of a second apart. Each image depicts OLI’s observations of electromagnetic radiation at slightly different wavelengths, or spectral bands. The offsets, or motion, in each image is due to the relative speed of the two spacecraft, the altitude of Landsat 8, and the fact that the images were taken at slightly different times.

For More Information

See http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=88275

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA's Earth Observatory

  • Project support

    • Amy Moran (Global Science and Technology, Inc.)

  • Writer

This page was originally published on Thursday, August 25, 2016.
This page was last updated on Tuesday, November 14, 2023 at 12:32 AM EST.