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[text on screen] Landsat 9 data is available!

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Jeff Masek: So it's really exciting to have Landsat 9 data

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being released for the first time. 

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This is the culmination of

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really, six or seven years of mission development.

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Everything we see that the data quality looks fantastic and, and

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operationally it's now collecting as much data as Landsat 8 does,

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Del Jenstrom: Landsat is a partnership between NASA and the USGS,

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U.S. Geological survey.

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And NASA builds the satellites and launches them

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and checks them out. We lead that aspect of it,

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USGS leads development of the ground system and mission operations.

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Voice-over: And liftoff! 

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Liftoff of an Atlas 5 rocket and Landsat 9.

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Del: Well, after we launched on September 27th, 2021,

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we spent a little over three months

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checking out the satellite on orbit. 

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And the ground and operations system as well.

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I can't be more proud of this team

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to bring this mission into its operational phase.

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The team has just built a wonderful satellite

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and wonderful operations and ground system.

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And the data that it produces is just spectacular.

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[text on screen] Landsat 9 has joined Landsat 8 in orbit.

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Jeff Masek: And so it means that we have really two top quality

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observatories on orbit at the same time, which

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doubles the temporal frequency that people can,

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can get this really excellent data now every eight days.

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And so for things like monitoring agriculture,

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monitoring water resources,

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anything where you really want that temporal repeat,

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it's going to be fantastic to have two of these,

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as I say, top quality observatories

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on orbit at the same time.

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Chris Crawford: So what I'm extremely excited about

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is that now with Landsat 9's,

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exceptional calibration and its wide dynamic range,

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that's very comparable to Landsat 8.

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We're going to get data that

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has excellent performance at low signal levels, 

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and then across really high signal levels

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where you have bright targets.

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We know the data is well calibrated. Cause then we can monitor

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the instruments on orbit.

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And then we can actually run ground campaigns

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as the satellite's flying over.

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These types of observations are really designed

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to verify and characterize and validate the quality of the data.

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And so I guess what I would say is that

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there have been a lot of people

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working a lot of hours in order to be able to deliver this high quality

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Landsat 9 science data as quickly as possible.

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Jeff Masek: Everything we've seen, the data quality looks fantastic.

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We have better data quality in fact, than we did with Landsat 8.

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So, I'm really excited to see what people are able to do with the dataset

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now that it's out there in the public

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and available for science.

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[music note]

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[NASA logo] [USGS logo]

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[text on screen] Landsat is a joint program of NASA and USGS