Operational Land Imager

The eighth Landsat mission is scheduled to launch on Feb. 11, 2013. The Landsat program is a series of Earth-observing satellite missions jointly managed by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey. For more than four decades, the Landsat mission has gathered multispectral imagery of the Earth from space. These continuous land surface observations have created an archive unmatched in quality, detail, coverage and length.

Ball Aerospace designed and built the Operational Land Imager (OLI) which represents a significant advancement in Landsat sensor technology by employing a more reliable design that improves performance. OLI’s 14-module detector array enables it to scan with a push-broom method rather than the older sweeping method. 

Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS)

The OLI instrument provides 15-meter (49 ft.) panchromatic and 30-meter (98 ft.) multi-spectral spatial resolutions along a 185-kilometer (115 mi.)-wide swath, which allows the entire globe to be imaged every 16 days. OLI’s sensitivity ultimately provides improved land surface information with fewer moving parts.

In addition to OLI, Ball Aerospace has also provided the Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) cryocooler for the eighth Landsat mission. The cryocooler will chill the TIRS instrument’s infrared photo detectors to a frigid 40 Kelvin. Radiometric performance has been substantially improved over previous Landsat sensors due to Ball Aerospace innovations in OLI and the TIRS instrument.

Prorgram Manager Profile

Charlie VanHouten is the Ball Aerospace program manager for the Operational Land Imager built for the 8th Landsat Mission. VanHouten says the most important thing to him as a program manager is collaboration – both within and outside the company.

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Recent Press Releases:

July 23, 2011 Ball Aerospace and the USGS on 40 Years of Landsat Observations
Aug. 9, 2011 – Ball Aerospace Ships Imaging Instrument for 2012 Landsat Mission

In the News:

Boulder Daily Camera: Boulder's Ball Aerospace providing imaging capacity for latest NASA Landsat  

Space News: Long-overdue Landsat Will Put Ground System to the Test

OLI B-roll video