Landsat 9 is a joint mission of NASA and the U. S. Geological Survey. It was launched on 27 September, and has been going through its initial set of on-orbit testing. NASA has released some of the first pictures taken by the satellite’s two imaging systems. They are the Operational Land Imager 2 (OLI-2), which detects visible, near-infrared and shortwave-infrared light in nine wavelengths, and the Thermal Infrared Sensor 2 (TIRS-2), which detects thermal radiation in two wavelengths to measure Earth’s surface temperatures and its changes.

Data from both systems are shown above. The TIRS-2 images are on the right.

I was part of the design team for TIRS-2. My principal contribution was the design and testing of the power supples for the Main Electronics Box and the Focal Plane Electronics (the IR imaging detectors). I started working on TIRS-2 in February, 2016, and my part of the team delivered our hardware at the end of 2018. It’s nice to see data coming back to Earth.

Image Credit: NASA