Landsat Next

Landsat Next will provide new capabilities for the next generation of Landsat users. The enhanced spatial and temporal resolution of the 26-band “superspectral” Landsat Next constellation will unlock new applications for water quality, crop production and plant stress, climate and snow dynamics, soil health and other essential environmental variables.

Landsat Next continues Landsat’s decades-long data record of multispectral imagery, which affords global, synoptic, and repetitive coverage of Earth’s land surfaces at a scale where natural and human-induced changes can be detected, differentiated, characterized, and monitored over time.

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Landsat Next Defined  

Landsat Next will be a constellation of three identical observatories sent into orbit on the same launch vehicle. The triplet observatories will be spaced 120 degrees apart at an orbital altitude of 653 kilometers (406 miles). Each observatory will consist of a spacecraft and a Landsat Next Instrument Suite (LandIS), which will acquire all bands nearly simultaneously. The simultaneity will minimize illumination changes between bands, facilitating both cloud screen detection and products derived from multispectral surface reflectance and thermal emission data (e.g., evapotranspiration). 

The Landsat Next constellation will provide an improved collective 6-day temporal revisit, a significant increase from the 16 intervals of either Landsat 8 or Landsat 9.  

While Landsat’s 8 and 9 measure 11 spectral bands from the visible to thermal infrared wavelengths, Landsat Next will collect data across 26 bands; this includes refined versions of the 11 Landsat “heritage” bands, ten new visible to shortwave spectral bands s, and three additional thermal bands to support emerging Landsat application. All bands will have higher spatial resolutions than former Landsat missions, with ground sample distances of 10 to 20 meters for visible, near infrared, and shortwave infrared bands and 60 meters for atmospheric and thermal infrared bands. 

With these improvements, Landsat Next will collect on average about 20 times more data than its predecessor, Landsat 9, and continue to provide free and open data access for all users.

The Landsat Next mission launch is planned for late 2030/early 2031.

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The Path to Landsat Next

Following the successful launch of Landsat 8 and during the development of Landsat 9, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and NASA assembled a team of experts from within both agencies for a Joint Agency Sustainable Land Imaging Architecture Study Team to evaluate how to inform an acquisition strategy for a follow-on mission that would best satisfy the diverse and evolving user needs. (Wu et al., 2019).

The highest-recommended architecture was a small constellation of “superspectral” space-based sensors that would improve the spectral, spatial, and temporal capabilities. Another goal is to be sufficiently consistent with data from earlier Landsat missions allowing land cover and land use change studies over multi-decadal periods.

Why Landsat Next

Landsat is a civilian satellite program that was initiated to map, monitor, and manage Earth’s natural resources. It has provided an unbiased and unvarnished history of the planet and its changing conditions during the past half-century. Landsat data are critical for mapping natural resources and impact numerous societal benefits such as food security, water use, disaster response and more. Landsat also provide essential data for monitoring the ecosystems, water quality, land cover and land use change, and an unparalleled data record of the environment and climate change.

Landsat has been the cornerstone of Earth observing for more than half a century, and Landsat Next will add to this record for the next generation:

• Landsat has been ranked as a top Earth-observation program in terms of societal benefits provided, along with GPS and weather satellites according to the 2014 National Science and Technology Council report.
• Landsat is the most widely used land remote sensing data source within Federal civil agencies.
• Commercial providers rely on Landsat’s rigorous calibration to build/improve products.
• Landsat has been an essential data source for a wide range of Earth science research. Landsat is the most cited Earth-observation data set within the scientific literature (Wulder et al., 2022):

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Landsat Next will provide enhancements over traditional Landsat “heritage” data:

• Improved temporal revisit will increase the probability of acquiring cloud-free scenes and enhance monitoring and management of dynamic and changing landscapes. The enables better monitoring of dynamic land and water surfaces such as vegetation and crop phenology, burn severity, water use and quality, coastal and wetland change, glacier, and ice sheet dynamics. 
• Improved spatial resolution for agricultural monitoring, ecological monitoring, urban studies, water resources management and other applications.

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Landsat Next will provide new capabilities for the next generation of Landsat users:

• New spectral bands and refined bands will support new and evolving applications, including surface water quality, cryospheric science, geology, and agricultural applications including crop management and water consumption.
• The new bands will have similar spatial/spectral characteristics to those of the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite, allowing easier integration of data products.

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