# Landsat 8
*missions*

## Specifications
- **operator**: usgs
- **actual launch**: "2013-02-11T00:00:00.000Z"
- **current status**: extended
- **orbit type**: Sun-synchronous, 705 km, 98.2 degree inclination, 10:12 LTDN
- **swath km**: 185
- **revisit days**: 16
- **tasking supported**: 0
- **archive depth years**: 12
- **last verified date**: 2026-05-24
- **verified by**: agency-doc
- **claim status**: agency-verified
- **paired revisit days**: 8

## Editorial
Landsat 8 is a sun-synchronous Earth observation satellite operated jointly by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), launched on 11 February 2013 from Vandenberg Air Force Base aboard an Atlas-V-401 rocket [^usgs-l8]. Originally designated the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM), it was renamed Landsat 8 upon achieving routine operations and carries two science instruments: the Operational Land Imager (OLI) and the Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) [^nasa-l8].

OLI, built by Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corporation, is a nine-band pushbroom multispectral imager spanning 430 to 2,300 nm, including a 15 m panchromatic band and a dedicated coastal/aerosol band at 0.43-0.45 um that was new to the Landsat programme [^usgs-l8] [^nasa-l8]. Its 12-bit radiometric resolution delivers 4,096 grey levels versus the 256 of Landsat 1-7, enabling detection of subtler surface reflectance differences [^nasa-l8]. TIRS, built in-house at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, uses Quantum Well Infrared Photodetector (QWIP) technology to measure land surface temperature in two thermal channels at 100 m native resolution, resampled to 30 m in distributed products [^usgs-l8] [^nasa-l8]. A known stray-light artefact affecting TIRS absolute calibration since launch was corrected in Landsat Collection 2, reducing Band 10 error from 2.1 K to 0.3 K at 300 K; Band 11 retains larger calibration uncertainty and split-window atmospheric correction is not recommended for Landsat 8 TIRS data [^usgs-calib].

The satellite operates in a 705 km sun-synchronous orbit with a 16-day repeat cycle and 10:12 local equatorial crossing time [^usgs-l8]. Since Landsat 9 launched on 27 September 2021 and assumed the primary operational role, Landsat 8 continues in extended operations in the same orbit phased 8 days apart, providing a combined 8-day revisit cadence and adding nearly 1,500 new scenes per day to the USGS archive [^usgs-l9]. By February 2023, Landsat 8 had contributed 2.5 million scenes to the 50-year Landsat archive [^nasa-l8]. Designed for 5 years with consumables supporting a decade of operations, the satellite has exceeded its 10-year design milestone through careful engineering and hardware redundancies [^nasa-l8].

All Landsat 8 data are distributed at no cost by USGS under the free and open data policy established in 2008. Landsat Collection 2 Level-2 science products, including surface reflectance and surface temperature, are available globally through USGS EarthExplorer and cloud-accessible via USGS/AWS Landsat on AWS [^usgs-coll2].

## Compositional position
- Landsat 8 --[mission_payloads]--> oli (products)

---
Source: https://eo-atlas.org/missions/landsat-8
Maintainer: SpectraWorks B.V. (CC-BY 4.0)