A Low-cost, Small-sat Mission Concept to Augment Landsat Temporal Repeat Frequency

Landsat image data have been used to document global land cover and land use change since 1972. The archive of Landsat imagery constitutes some of the most valuable climate data records available to the world. There has been a longstanding interest in not only maintaining the continuity of Landsat imaging, but in increasing its temporal repeat frequency to improve agricultural and ecological monitoring for food security, water resource, and carbon stock assessments, among other uses. However, the prospect of maintaining the current 8-day repeat coverage provided by the Landsat 5 and 7 missions over the past decade will be hard to realize given the escalating production costs of these high precision missions. We have taken a fresh look at developing a small-sat imaging concept to derive cost-effective solutions that can provide imagery of sufficient quality and quantity to augment global Landsat coverage. We refer to this concept as LOGICAL, which stands for Land Observations Globally In a Cost-effective Augmentation of Landsat. A synopsis of the concept is presented, along with preliminary findings that indicate that it is possible to build and launch a smallsat Landsat-like mission, not including the thermal infrared capability, for a cost that is approximately 10% that of a typical “gold standard” Landsat mission.