# U.S. Geological Survey
*agency . companies*

US federal scientific agency, bureau of the Department of the Interior, founded 1879. Agency HQ at Reston, Virginia; Landsat operational HQ at the Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Co-manages the Landsat program with NASA, with NASA procuring spacecraft and instruments, managing launch, and overseeing initial orbital checkout, while USGS assumes operational control thereafter, runs the ground segment, processes data to Collection 2 specifications, and distributes globally at no cost. The 2008 USGS free and open Landsat data policy is the structural enabler of GLAD-L, Hansen Global Forest Change, and PRODES.

## Specifications
- **country**: USA
- **website**: https://www.usgs.gov
- **operator domains**: ["usgs.gov"]
- **founded year**: 1879
- **last verified date**: 2026-05-24
- **verified by**: sw
- **claim status**: agency-sourced

## Editorial
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is a bureau of the U.S. Department of the Interior, established by Congress in 1879 to provide science and information on natural resources and natural hazards. Its Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center in Sioux Falls, South Dakota is the operational hub of the joint USGS-NASA Landsat program and a major repository for land imagery globally.

Within the Landsat program, NASA procures spacecraft and instruments, manages launch, and oversees initial orbital checkout; USGS then assumes operational control of the spacecraft, runs the EROS ground segment, processes imagery to Collection 2 specifications, and distributes data globally at no cost. That cost-free model has been in place since 2008, when USGS made the full Landsat archive freely downloadable, a policy that structurally enables major land-monitoring products including the GLAD forest-alert system (University of Maryland), the Hansen Global Forest Change dataset, and Brazil's PRODES deforestation monitoring.

Collection 2 products span three tiers. Level-1 data covers Landsat 1 through 9. Level-2 science products (Surface Reflectance, SR, and Surface Temperature, ST) are available globally for Landsat 4 through 9 from 1982 to present, delivered as Cloud Optimized GeoTIFFs within 24 hours of scene acquisition. Level-3 U.S. Analysis Ready Data (ARD) comply with CEOS ARD standards and are tiled for immediate continental-scale analysis. Access is through EarthExplorer (graphical interface across 120+ datasets), a machine-to-machine JSON API, and direct AWS cloud access via STAC.

At EROS, USGS co-operates the Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LP DAAC) jointly with NASA. Established in 1990, LP DAAC distributes more than 14 petabytes of land remote sensing data including ASTER, MODIS, VIIRS, ECOSTRESS, GEDI, EMIT, and Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 products. USGS also leads the Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics (MRLC) consortium, which produces the National Land Cover Database (NLCD), an annual 30-metre land-cover classification for the coterminous United States derived from Landsat and supplementary Sentinel-2 imagery.

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Source: https://eo-atlas.org/companies/usgs
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