Launch of Landsat 8 Successful (Picture)

The Atlas-V rocket with the Landsat 8 spacecraft onboard is pictured as it launches on Monday, Feb. 11, 2013 at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. The spacecraft separated from the rocket 79 minutes after launch and the first signal was received 3 minutes later at a ground station in Svalbard, Norway. The solar arrays deployed 86 minutes after launch, and the spacecraft is generating power from them. LDCM is on course to reach its operational, sun-synchronous, polar orbit  705 kilometers above Earth within two months.

The new satellite will join Landsat 7 in space where the two will be able to image the entire planet in a mere eight days, though they orbit around the Earth itself every 90 minutes. This imaging system is crucial for tracking large-scale changes on the planet, and gives scientists a bird's eye view of environmental changes and surface processes.

"Landsat is a centerpiece of NASA's Earth Science program, and today's successful launch will extend the longest continuous data record of Earth's surface as seen from space," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said. "This data is a key tool for monitoring climate change and has led to the improvement of human and biodiversity health, energy and water management, urban planning, disaster recovery and agriculture monitoring -- all resulting in incalculable benefits to the U.S. and world economy."

Yet it's not only scientists that have access to this data. The entire image library of Landsat data was placed on the Internet in 2009 for anyone to use. The archived data is the longest continuous record of Earth's land surface as seen from space. It also allows programs such as Google Earth to exist.

There is also a plan for Europe's forthcoming Sentinel series of satellites to combine with Landsat. The European Union's Copernicus programme will see the launch of Sentinel-2a and 2b in the next three years. Their Multi-Spectral Imagers are broadly similar to the Operational Land Imager on Landsat-8.

On a side note, Landsat 5 just set the new Guinness World Records title for 'Longest-operating Earth observation satellite' in December 2012 as stated by Guinness World Records. Outliving its three-year design life, Landsat 5 delivered high-quality, global data of Earth's land surface for 28 years and 10 months.