Landsat's International Ground Stations and the Global Archive Consolidation

Landsat 8 and 9 International Ground Stations and the Landsat Ground Network, as of January 2023. USGS.

International Cooperators

Landsat has always been part of U.S. foreign policy as well as science and technology policy. Its long-standing network of International Cooperators (ICs), which run International Ground Stations (IGSs) around the world, embodies the U.S. policy of peaceful use of outer space and sharing civil space technology for the public good.

• Backup: today's Landsat 8 and Landsat 9 IGSs can collect data if the Landsat Ground Network is hit by a spacecraft anomaly or malfunction.
• Reach: ICs extend the distribution and use of Landsat data worldwide, and their expertise in applying it to local and regional needs helps USGS science and applications.
• Coordination: the USGS meets the ICs twice a year through the Landsat Ground Station Operators Working Group and the Landsat Technical Working Group. More on the IC network.

Bringing the archives home

Historically, IGSs added capacity beyond what the satellites' onboard recorders could hold. Landsat has imaged the globe for more than five decades, and because early satellites could record little, much of what was downlinked to IGSs is unique to each station's coverage and not in the USGS archive (historical stations).

In 2010, the USGS began the Landsat Global Archive Consolidation (LGAC) initiative: to gather every IGS archive into the USGS Landsat archive, make the data easier to reach, and sharply increase how often any given place was observed — all to better understand a changing Earth.

The challenges:

• data in varied or unknown formats and processing methods;
• stations that no longer operate;
• the age and condition of storage media;
• obsolete technology for reading the data.

Some data may be unrecoverable, but every available approach will be tried. More than 6.6 million scenes have been added since LGAC began, and everything ingested becomes available through USGS data portals and the commercial cloud.

Landsat 4–7 scenes added through the consolidation: more than 6.2 million as of January 2023. USGS.

Landsat 1–3 scenes added: more than 400,000 as of January 2023. USGS.

More information

Landsat User Services, USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center, Sioux Falls, South Dakota — custserv@usgs.gov; and the National Land Imaging Program.

Sources

Based on Landsat International Cooperators and Global Archive Consolidation, USGS Fact Sheet 2016–3018 (version 1.3, April 2023), U.S. Geological Survey (DOI); a work of the United States government in the public domain. The maps, and passages the import cut short, come from the fact sheet's PDF.