Landsat is a continuous record of how the planet is changing, more than 50 years long and freely and openly available to users worldwide.
Consistency is what gives that record its value, according to EarthDaily CEO Don Osborne. He describes it as “built on decades of consistent and trusted measurement,” and says EarthDaily was built around the same idea. “To understand change, you first need measurements you can trust and compare over time,” he said.
NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey are now exploring how commercial data could fit alongside it. Vancouver-based EarthDaily has been awarded a $3 million task order by NASA to supply data and technical support for that work.
The task order falls under the Sustainable Land Imaging commercial transition initiative, a joint NASA and USGS effort studying how commercial Earth observation data could complement government systems while still meeting the Landsat record’s needs for scientific quality and continuity.
EarthDaily was created in 2021 in partnership with Antarctica Capital and has since acquired Descartes Labs and SkyForest. Its technology supports applications in agriculture, insurance, mining, forestry, environmental monitoring, defence and national security.
The agencies will use data from the EarthDaily Constellation to see how it measures up. They will check it against Landsat’s standards and requirements, looking at calibration, stability, radiometric and geometric performance and whether it can be harmonized with Landsat data, and they will test whether it can produce surface reflectance and surface temperature measurements at the level Landsat delivers.
Testing will run EarthDaily’s data alongside Landsat and other reference missions, including within USGS’s Analysis Ready Data and NASA’s Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 workflows.
One thing the evaluation will weigh is how often the planet gets imaged. Eight of EarthDaily’s 10 satellites are now in orbit, and together they image all of the planet’s landmass every two days. Once all 10 are operating, the constellation will image about 92% of landmass daily, with Antarctica excluded. The agencies will look at whether adding commercial observations to government systems could mean more frequent revisits and higher spatial resolution.
The constellation was designed so those images can be compared with one another. The satellites cross the equator at roughly 10:30 a.m. local time in a sun-synchronous orbit, which supports consistent morning imaging, and the imaging swath is 240 km wide. They collect data across 22 spectral bands running from visible light to thermal wavelengths, with native resolution of 5 metres in the visible and near-infrared, 95 metres in the short-wave infrared and 120 metres in the thermal infrared.
No sharpening is applied to create the appearance of finer detail, and together these choices produce observations that can be compared directly from one collection to the next.
That consistency also matters for AI. Steady, standardized calibration makes EarthDaily’s data a dependable input for models trying to spot real change, among them foundation models trained on decades of Landsat imagery. If its observations can be aligned with the Landsat archive, they could carry those long records forward with more frequent measurements.
Throughout the evaluation, EarthDaily’s scientists will meet regularly with NASA and USGS scientific and program leads to go over data quality, cross-calibration, algorithms, product specifications, processing workflows and integration. Findings will be reviewed jointly and used to refine products and documentation, and to pin down what commercial data would need to meet to be harmonized with the Landsat archive.
For EarthDaily, showing that its data meet Landsat-aligned performance thresholds and provide enough value would mark an early move toward hybrid mission architectures that combine government and commercial assets. EarthDaily also wants any approach to keep what has made Landsat so useful, including that continuous, freely and openly available record.