Landsat 7: An Early Look at On-Orbit Performance

As this article was being submitted in mid-March, 1999, Landsat 7 had been cleared for an official launch date of April 15, 1999, approximately 2 and 1/2 months prior to the 21st Canadian Symposium on Remote Sensing. Since it is impossible to discuss "early on-orbit performance" prior to the actual launch of the satellite, we have chosen to briefly summarize the major features of the Landsat 7 program. Additional information can be found at several web sites which will summarized at the end of this paper. At this time, the Landsat Project Science Office is pleased to report that the performance of the ETM+ instrument appears to be very good. In addition to excellent instrument performance, a robust data acquisition plan has been developed with the goal of acquiring and systematically refreshing a global archive of land observations at the EROS Data Center annually. A ground processing system is being implemented at EROS that will be capable of capturing, processing and archiving 250 Landsat scenes per day, and delivering 100 scene products to users daily. In addition, the cost of a systematically-processed Level 1 product will be less than $600, and there will be no copyright protection on the data. The net result is that the use of remote sensing data in our daily lives is expected to grow dramatically. This growth is expected to benefit all facets of the land remote sensing community.