A desert river.
Its verdant banks bursting with new vegetation.
A sea of sand dunes
blanketed with fresh snow.
A mountain, its sides dazzling
with the arrival of autumn's foliage.
Images that not only captured the imagination, but more importantly
tell a story.
A story of our planet's surface ever evolving.
A patchwork of rivers, mountains, deserts,
oceans, farmlands and cities.
A story told over the course of days, months,
years and decades, all thanks to the Landsat program.
Landsat actually was one of the things that first got me involved
in remote sensing.
Landsat provided that global perspective but still at the management
scale resolution.
level, field scale, but also provide that sort of whole earth scale resolution.
And that was pretty exciting.
For over 50 years, Landsat has watched over Earth,
giving us critical insights into the way our planet is changing with us
and around us Now eight satellites later.
It's time for this story's next chapter.
Landsat. Next.
the next
phase in the longest space based record of Earth's land surface
will provide a host of new capabilities for the next generation of Landsat
data users, including enhanced spatial resolution and 15 new spectral bands.
But the most remarkable feature of this new mission.
while previous Landsat missions have all featured one satellite, Landsat.
Next will be a trio, a constellation of three
observatories circling the globe in unison.
even before the launch of the last Landsat, the user community
was actually being queried about what was their needs for the next Landsat,
one of the things that came back was all the users said, higher
temporary visit was the highest thing that people were looking for.
And the way you get higher temporary visit is, you either have a wider swath
so that you're have a wider field of view.
or you have more satellites that are viewing a larger portion
of the earth all the time.
we came up with this approach that utilizes three smaller observatories
to meet that temporal revisit and incorporates
those spatial resolution improvements and each observatory
while maintaining the full spectral capability across each observatory
This new triplet configuration will greatly improve the temporal revisit
time from 16 days with Landsat nine
down to just six days Landsat next will give scientists
and data users a more precise view of how a scene changes over time.
This can help highlight key stages of plant growth
and is useful for crop management and estimating yield.
one of the criteria actually we use to assess just even types of cover
is based on when the crops emerge when they might be harvested.
but also being able to look at different insect outbreaks,
look at different effects of drought.
All this stuff can happen very fast, so being able to respond quickly,
this is an important aspect of being able to have this higher temporal revisit.
Throughout the program's history, Landsat satellites have been able
to chronicle the surface of our planet in stunning detail.
Landsat next will look to push that capability even further.
To understand the resolution of Landsat, We need to zoom
all the way in until we see individual pixels.
Each pixel of a Landsat eight or nine seen is about 30 square meters.
Landsat next looks to improve this to ten meters, roughly nine times
the resolution allowing us to pinpoint finer details within the image.
this is fantastic.
So now we'll be actually picking up about 40%
more agricultural fields that we totally missed before.
And that's just in the US alone.
So some of these smaller agricultural fields, wind rows,
crevasses and ice fields, those will be picked up.
And new Landsat data,
This enhanced spatial resolution won't be limited to just visible light.
Thermal bands will also be getting an upgrade from 100 meters to 60 meters.
A resolution
dimensions slightly larger than the bottom of the Statue of Liberty pedestal.
Urban areas like New York City
are prone to suffering from a phenomenon called the heat Island effect.
As an excess of impervious surfaces absorb and re emit, the sun's heat
Using Landsat next's improved thermal resolution.
Scientists and data users will have the ability
to map the temperature of urban areas in finer detail,
Possibly shedding light on better methods of sustainable urban development.
Landsat imagery is well known for the vivid detail
it provides of the Earth's surface, But Landsat satellites
are actually collecting data from across the spectrum.
starting with four.
Spectral bands with Landsat.
One through three, up to.
11 bands with Landsat eight and nine.
From visible to thermal infrared.
Landsat next looks to push the program's spectral capabilities even further,
boasting an additional 15 spectral bands,
bringing the total to a whopping 26.
With more than double the spectral bands of Landsat,
eight and nine users will be able to glean even more information
from Landsat next data allowing for better resource management,
such as tracking water quality and detecting harmful algal blooms.
coastal waterways, we're experiencing algae blooms like never before,
those are health concerns for our population.
being able to detect those and respond to them quickly,
you know, that temporary visit and those new bands enable us to do that.
The other thing is actually being able to better track dynamics of snow and ice.
The melting snow and ice are used
to recharge water sources, especially in the western US.
So being able to know when those resources are going to be available determining
potential for flooding versus recharge is very important for water management.
It's often
said that Landsat superpower is time travel, granting its users
the ability to rewind the clock and observe the evolution
of our planet's surface during the last half century.
But the true key to unlocking Landsat its ability to travel in time
has been the remarkable consistency in data quality across multiple decades.
And Landsat missions.
more than that.
Actually, it's a time machine,
but it's also a time in space machine, I would argue.
it's not only being able to look back into time,
I think it's also being able to look at different places on the globe
and give in a consistent picture anywhere on the globe as well.
And that's what Landsat allows us to do.
There's a consistency in the measurements
there's consistency in the way the instruments were calibrated.
The reason why this is so important is the changes on earth.
Will there be changes in vegetation or subtle changes on the Earth's surfaces
that we want to make sure that that we're actually capturing these changes?
And they aren't just changes in the instruments themselves.
Landsat has been historically the gold standard reference
for calibration of many different missions across the whole globe.
the radiometric quality for Landsat next will be at least as good
as any previous Landsat.
So we will maintain that standard for calibration and referencing
for all missions Landsat next three satellites improved.
Six day temporal revisit.
Enhanced spatial resolution and 26 spectral bands
all add up to a massive amount of data.
Landsat eight and nine each recorded around 750 scenes per day.
with Landsat next trio of satellites, that number will skyrocket
over 2200 scenes per day More scenes means more data
this will be a huge increase in data volume.
this means we're not going to be downloading data anymore.
Get ready to be doing all your data processing in the cloud.
missing data volume and management is is our number
one challenge on on Landsat next.
once we get that data to the ground, our partners at USGS
who operate the ground network and ground systems, they can handle that
transmission and then publish it and provide it to the cloud
for all these users to have free and open access to this data.
I can't stress enough how exciting that is for, any small university
to be able to sign up and and tap into that data
It's still early days for the Landsat next
mission, slated for launch in late 2030.
There's no shortage of work to be done over the next seven years,
but plans for the new triplet
constellation, upgraded spatial and temporal resolutions
and added spectral bands have the Landsat next team excited.
our mission right now is really a quantum step forward from previous Lance.
That's this may be the biggest leap in capability
since the launch of Lance S7 in we launch
in 2030, it'll be the biggest improvement in 30 years.
very, very excited.
I can't wait to see what comes out
of all of these emerging applications and how well it supports the user.
Over the life of the Landsat program, the world's population
has more than doubled, leading to increasing pressure
on precious resources such as food and water.
But time and time again, Landsat missions have only served
to highlight humankind's innate ability to adapt to its environments,
enabling us to develop better methods of sustainable resource management
by helping farmers to monitor the health of their crops
and efficiently manage their water resources
by guiding forestry management programs on better ways to identify
areas at risk for wildfires and track changes in land use over time,
or by contributing to conservation efforts.
Monitoring and assessing the biodiversity of coastal wetlands and protected areas.
Landsat next will look to not only preserve this over
50 year legacy, but bring it into the future.
we live on this planet Earth.
We all know that we want to leave this planet for our children.
We know the importance of sustainability.
And I think that's what Lance that's all about.
it's about helping us manage the planet that we live on for the long term.
And that's why it's there and that's why it continues to be here.
And expect it to be there for the next generation as well.
one of my most excited
about there's there's two things I think I touched on one of them.
What am I most excited about in Landsat?
Next?
Two things. One is,
you know, and you've you've you've done this, too.
Is that the sheer volume of data with Landsat next is going to be enormous.
And that means we're not going to be downloading data.
I never like downloading data.
It's a waste of time.
I think anybody that's downloading anything from the web, they know it's a
that's a no one likes to sit there and wait for data to come to them.
They'd rather be something else. And
and I think being able to actually
start working with the data online is going to be huge.
And I think some of the new developments you've heard about with
AI and machine learning language is also going to be huge
too, especially as we get finer and finer resolution data.
I think that's going to be huge in terms of what we can do with the data
because there's going to be so much of the data I've already bragged
that we're going to have higher temperature revisit.
I've bragged that we're going to have more spectral brands bins.
I've bragged that, you know, we're we're going to have
higher, higher everything, more data, you know,
And so that really opens up the door for machine learning and more computer
capability
than than than we've used in the past.
And I'm really looking forward to that.
And I think this is going to open up all doors for new possibilities
in terms of what we can do with the data.
Some people are scared about that, but I see it as a new opportunity
and a new way of of analyzing the data.
It gets me really excited.
The other thing I'm excited
by is, is the fact that we always seem to uncover new things.
The more we keep studying, the longer we keep looking at something,
the more we I guess my previous
project scientist said the longer we keep studying
things, the more
the more observations.
And the longer we keep studying something, the more we uncover.
And it seems like
the I mean, even
even some of the observation, some of the theories
put forth by Einstein were still challenging those observations.
And I think the same is true for Landsat.
The more data we come up with, we keep challenging our scientific theories.
We keep developing new theories.
I think there's nothing that doesn't get better with more observations
and more time, and I think that's true with Landsat next to.