Brief History

Since March 1st, 1984, TM instrument on board Landsat 5 mission collected an impressive amount of remote sensing data. The operations are continuing much longer than the nominal mission lifetime (5 years) and both Instrument and platform are making proof of reliability. USGS team in charge of mission monitoring is 'pro-active', issues related to bumper mode, transmission, solar panel have been perfectly managed. An up to date calibration table is proposed for accounting of mission lifetime and detector sensitivity degradation. Consolidated platform state vectors are proposed to ground station for correcting orbit determination degradation and so that improving product geo location. The only limitation USGS foreseen is the hydrazine level that ensures propulsion and control.

Part of these historical data is archived at ESA ground stations. When talking about historical data, it is important to note that MSS data from Landsat 1 2 3 4 have been acquired at Fucino (Italy) as well. These data are now archived at Matera. User requests for these data remain important, especially when working on change detection.

The last mission, Landsat 7, was launched in April 1999, with ETM+ instrument on board. In 2001, ESA stations ceased acquisition of such data because of SLC anomaly. USGS anomaly recovery plan provides partial solution for which pixel data is interpolated and is the result from a merge procedure between consecutive acquisitions. Using this method, ESA considered that the scientific meaning of the pixel value was not preserved, and this is the main reason why acquisition has been stopped. About two years of ETM+ data are archived at ESA stations and disseminated between Maspalomas, Matera, Neustrelitz and Kiruna.

The Landsat 8 (LDCM Landsat Data Continuity Mission) is the future mission that is planned for launch on 2011-2012. To the multi-spectral instrument may be added a thermal instrument for the monitoring of forest fires.