Landsat 5: The Longest Operating Earth Observation Satellite

Guinness World Records, formerly The Guinness Book of Records, gave the title ‘Longest-Operating Earth Observation Satellite’ to Landsat 5. An e-mail sent to NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Said satellite outlived its life-expectancy of three years and is now operating for 28 years and 10 months.

Landsat 5 was launched by NASA from Vandenberg Air Force base in Lompoc, California on March 1, 1984. The satellite carried the same instrument as Landsat 4 such as the Multispectral Scanner System (MSS) and the Thematic Mapper (TM). Landsat 5 also completed over 150,000 orbits and sent back more than 2.5 million images of Earth’s surface with the management of the U.S. Geological Survery (USGS).

USGS, unfortunately, announced last December 21, 2012 that Landsat 5 had a failure of a redundant gyroscope and will have to be decommissioned.

Anne Castle, Department of the Interior Assistant Secretary for Water and Science, said in a press release, “This is the end of an era for a remarkable satellite, and the fact that it flew for almost three decades is a testament to the NASA engineers who launched it and the USGS team who kept it flying well beyond its expected lifetime.”

Equipped with extra fuel, Landsat 5 faced and got passed through more than 20 technical issue through its entire lifetime.

“The efforts of the Landsat team were heroic. Landsat 5 could not have lasted so long without the dedication and devotion of the USGS flight operations team that overcame a number of difficult technical challenges over the last 12 years,” said LDCM project scientist, Jim Irons.

“Landsat 5 saved the Landsat program. This satellite’s longevity preserved the Landsat program through the loss of Landsat 6 in 1993, preventing the specter of a data gap before the launch of Landsat 7 in 1999,” Irons adds.

The Landsat program is still serving its purpose of providing data used across United States. and the world for agricultural and forest monitoring and water resource management, among many other environmental applications. Now, Landsat 7’s next successor was launched last February 11, equipped with two new instruments: the Operational Land Imager and the Thermal Infrared Sensor to collect data that are compatible with data from Landsat 5 & 7and improve upon it with advanced instrument designs that are more sensitive to changes to the land surface, according to Irons.

Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) will continue the Landsat program’s 40-year data record of monitoring Earth from space.

 

See also: Mobile Backhauling