An Hour of Earth from Above: Landsat Imagery from the Earth Resources Observation and Science Center
In the spring and summer of 2025, visitors to the CLUI in Los Angeles basked in slow-moving satellite scans from around the globe, selected and produced by the U.S. Geological Survey’s Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center.
Located near the middle of the country, outside of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, EROS is the image processing center and archive for Landsat, the federal government’s primary non-military earth imaging satellite program. Since launching its first satellite in 1972, Landsat, operated by the USGS and NASA, has been scanning the whole planet twice a month, continuously, for more than 50 years, and makes its millions of images available to everyone in the world, free of charge.