Landsat Next Planned Orbits and Swath Coverage

Landsat Next is the follow on mission to Landsat-9. Landsat Next which will provide data continuity to the decades long data record of the Earth’s land from space. It is still in the planning stages and is targeted for launch around 2030. Landsat Next is planned to have more than twice the number of bands as Landsat 8 and 9 and will consist of 3 separate spacecraft. This reduces amount of time needed for full Earth coverage to around 6 days.

These visualizations show example orbits and swaths of Landsat Next. The orbit swath widths shown are 164km wide. There are 2 versions: one is more equatorial, the other is more polar.

The equatorial view shows the spacecraft orbits and swaths slowly appearing, revealing the colored Earth tiles. The orbits speed up showing the distances between orbits. The speed increases showing several days quickly. Finally, the orbits slow down as the last few orbits complete the full coverage of the Earth about 6 days from when it started.

The polar view shows the same thing from a different camera view. The polar view highlights the approximate 10:10am crossing time of the daytime (descending) orbits. It also shows how the swaths have more overlap near the poles than near the equator. The yellow arrow is the where the sun shines directly down onto the Earth.