All articles tagged with #landsat 9
NASA’s Landsat 9 satellite captured a new false-color image of Vasquez Rocks in southern California, revealing the iconic Star Trek filming location used for the 'Metron' planet. The image highlights the area's unique 25-million-year-old rock formations and vegetation through shortwave-infrared wavelengths.
NASA’s Earth Observatory highlights Congaree National Park in South Carolina, where 80% of the park lies within the Congaree River floodplain. Satellite data from Landsat 9 shows how the river’s meandering path creates distinct ecosystems, including oxbow lakes and nutrient-rich wetlands that support some of the largest old-growth bottomland hardwood forests in the U.S.
Landsat 9 imagery shows Barnes Ice Cap on Baffin Island losing its snow cover unusually early in the 2026 Arctic summer, exposing bare ice dotted with blue meltwater ponds and a widening network of meltwater channels. With snow gone, the ice warms and melts faster, indicating continued thinning and retreat (historically about 4 m per year over 40 years, with some areas retreating much faster) and earlier surface runoff that reduces refreezing.
NASA’s Landsat 9 regularly points its sensors at the Moon during the full Moon to detect and correct drift, using the Moon’s stability as a reference to keep decades of Earth observations consistent, a process that runs alongside Artemis’ return to lunar exploration.
Fresh Landsat 9 imagery shows volcanic heat melting snow on Russia’s active Shiveluch volcano in Kamchatka, revealing a growing lava dome and dark flow channels; the heat from recent activity continues to reshape the snowy slopes and raises the potential for pyroclastic flows as the dome evolves.
A Landsat 9 image from April 23, 2026 shows Shiveluch volcano in Kamchatka with a growing lava dome and ongoing eruptions, including block-and-ash flows and hot lava channels that darken and melt surrounding snow, highlighting the persistent activity shaping the landscape.
NASA's Earth Observatory spotlights fiery autumn colors in southern Chile's lenga beech forests (Nothofagus pumilio) in Patagonia, captured by Landsat 9 on April 12, 2026, highlighting the range and elevation of these beech forests and their vivid yellows and reds as days shorten.
Landsat 9 satellite imagery detected mysterious tracks scoring the icy surface of a remote fjord in Greenland, prompting an investigation by scientists with NASA’s Cryospheric Science Laboratory. While some of the lines seen in the imagery look like natural ice deformation features, others were perfectly geometrical and likely caused by vehicles moving across the surface of the ice. The tracks appeared to originate from the towns of Qassiarsuk and Narsarsuaq, suggesting that residents were out on the ice, possibly hunting or traveling.
NASA scientists have discovered long, straight lines on southern Greenland's Tunulliarfik Fjord, likely created by people using vehicles such as snowmobiles for travel or hunting. The fjord's waters were capped with a layer of sea ice when the images were captured by Landsat 9's Operational Land Imager-2 (OLI-2) on March 13, 2023. The track that runs the length of the fjord is at least 20 kilometers (12 miles) long.
NASA's Landsat 9 satellite captured images of Tunulliarfik Fjord in Greenland, revealing several long, straight lines connecting the towns of Narsarsuaq and Qassiarsuk, and running the length of the fjord. Many of the tracks were likely produced by vehicles, such as snowmobiles, according to scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. The track that runs the length of the fjord is at least 20 kilometers long. The fjord's waters are ice-free much of the year, except for floating icebergs that have broken off from the glacier to the north.