Landsat 9 was carried into space aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket that lifted off from foggy Vandenberg Space Force Base at 11:12 a.m. Landsat 9 will take the orbital track of Landsat 7, which will be decommissioned. Landsat 9 carries an imaging sensor that will record visible and other portions of the spectrum. The Landsat program has amassed over 9 million multispectral images of Earth’s land and coastal regions, according to Jeff Masek, Landsat 9 project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “We can also look at the consumption of water by crops.”Landsat 9’s liftoff was the 2,000th launch from Vandenberg since 1958.

Source: ABC News September 27, 2021 19:06 UTC