Recent Earth Science News and Articles
Stay up-to-date with the latest news and articles from NASA Earth as we discover more about our home planet.
From Alaska’s Saint Elias Mountains to Pakistan’s Karakoram, glaciers speed up and slow down with the seasons.
New research uses more than 40 years of data from NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) Landsat satellites to help dam operators improve the health of salmon fisheries.
Satellites have tracked development over the decades as a small city in southern Nigeria grew to more than 2 million people.
The ancient walls, ramparts, and ditches that wind through this Nigerian city are the longest known earthworks of the pre-mechanical era.
In southeastern Libya, Jabal Arkanū’s concentric rock rings stand as relics of past geologic forces that churned beneath the desert.
The tart berry and state fruit brings a red pop to holiday feasts—and to satellite images of Midwestern marshlands.
The Worldwide Reference System (WRS) organizes Landsat imagery into a global grid, providing a consistent, reliable framework for locating, comparing, and analyzing data over time and across sensors.
The Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) transformed Landsat into a global observatory, providing freely available data of the entire Earth for the first time. ETM+ spurred scientific breakthroughs in long-term, global land studies.
The Thematic Mapper (TM), carried by Landsats 4 and 5, represented a significant advancement in Earth observation technology. The TM enabled the first-ever natural-color images of the Landsat program, allowing us to observe Earth as we see it.
The Multispectral Scanner System (MSS) was the first digital remote sensing instrument, revolutionizing Earth observation from space.
The Return Beam Vidicon Camera System (RBV) was carried by the first three Landsat satellites and used high-resolution television cameras to capture Earth imagery in multiple spectral bands.
Landsat 8, originally called the Landsat Data Continuity Mission, was designed to continue the decades-long legacy of the program. Explore the milestones, development, and operations that led up to Landsat 8’s launch.
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