Following the successful launch of Landsat 8 and during the development of Landsat 9, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and NASA assembled a team of experts from within both agencies for a Joint Agency Sustainable Land Imaging Architecture Study Team to evaluate how to inform an acquisition strategy for a follow-on mission that would best satisfy the diverse and evolving user needs collect by the USGS. The highest-recommended architecture was a small constellation of “superspectral

A Long March-4B (CZ-4B serial number Y55) rocket launched the Gaofen-11 04 observation satellites from Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center (platform LC9), north China's Shanxi Province, Dec. 2022, at 15:37 Beijing time (07:37 UTC). According to official sources, Gaofen-11 04 (高分 十一 号 04, Gāo Fēn Shíyī hào04, “GF11-04”) entered the initial target orbit as planned, and a network with Gaofen-11 01, 02 and 03 will be added to “improve the efficiency of Earth observation and make greater contributions fo

SpaceX, the space exploration company, launched a research satellite into orbit on Friday 16 December 2022. Named SWOT (Surface Water and Ocean Topography), the satellite – which is the size of a large car – will measure the water level on more than 90% of the planet’s surface from its position 890km above the Earth. Scientists will use this data to identify areas vulnerable to flooding or extreme drought, as well as to track the rate of rising sea levels and the resulting coastal erosion.

Shapely 2.0 version is a major release featuring a complete refactor of the internals and new vectorized (element-wise) array operations, providing considerable performance improvements (based on the developments in the PyGEOS package), along with several breaking API changes and many feature improvements.   Refactor of the internals# Shapely wraps the GEOS C++ library for use in Python. Before 2.0, Shapely used ctypes to link to GEOS at runtime, but doing so resulted in extra ove

Landsat Next is on the horizon—the new mission will not only ensure continuity of the longest space-based record of Earth’s land surface, it will fundamentally transform the breadth and depth of actionable information freely available to end users. Landsat Next will also provide new capabilities for the next generation of Landsat users. The enhanced spatial and temporal resolution of the 26-band “superspectral” Landsat Next constellation will unlock new applications for water qu