Geological Survey (USGS) are developing the successor mission to Landsat 7 that is currently known as the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM), NASA is responsible for buHding and launching the LDCM satellite observatory, USGS is building the ground system and wi!1 assume responsibility for sate!Hte operations and for collecting. archiving, and distributing data following launch. The observatory wi!! consist of a spacecraft in low-Earth orbit with a two-sensor payload. One sensor, the Operational land Imager (OU), wi!! collect image data for nine shortwave spectra! bands over a ! 85 km swath with a 30 m spatia] resolution for all bands except a 15 m panchromatic band. The other instrument, the Thermal !nfrared Sensor (TIRS), wi!! collect image data for two thermal bands with a 100 m resolution over a 185 km swath. Both sensors offer technical advancements over earlier Landsat instruments. OU and TIRS will coincidently collect data and the observatory will transmit the data to the ground system where it will be archived, processed to Level I data products containing well calibrated and co-registered OU and TIRS data, and made available for free distribution to the general public. The LDCM development is on schedule for a December 2012 launch, The USGS intends to rename the satellite "Umdsat 8" following launch, By either name a successful mission will fulfill a mandate for Landsat data continuity, The mission wi!! extend the almost 40-year landsat data archive with images sufficiently consistent with data from the earlier missions to allow long-term studies of regional and global land cover change,

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Launched in February 2013, the Landsat-8 carries on-board the Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS), a two-band thermal pushbroom imager, to maintain the thermal imaging capability of the Landsat program. The TIRS bands are centered at roughly 10.9 and 12 μm (Bands 10 and 11 respectively). They have 100 m spatial resolution and image coincidently with the Operational Land Imager (OLI), also on-board Landsat-8. The TIRS instrument has an internal calibration system consisting of a variable temperature blackbody and a special viewport with which it can see deep space; a two point calibration can be performed twice an orbit. Immediately after launch, a rigorous vicarious calibration program was started to validate the absolute calibration of the system. The two vicarious calibration teams, NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), both make use of buoys deployed on large water bodies as the primary monitoring technique. RIT took advantage of cross-calibration opportunity soon after launch when Landsat-8 and Landsat-7 were imaging the same targets within a few minutes of each other to perform a validation of the absolute calibration. Terra MODIS is also being used for regular monitoring OPEN ACCESSRemote Sens. 2014, 6 11608 of the TIRS absolute calibration. The buoy initial results showed a large error in both bands, 0.29 and 0.51 W/m 2 ·sr·μm or −2.1 K and −4.4 K at 300 K in Band 10 and 11 respectively, where TIRS data was too hot. A calibration update was recommended for both bands to correct for a bias error and was implemented on 3 February 2014 in the USGS/EROS processing system, but the residual variability is still larger than desired for both bands (0.12 and 0.2 W/m 2 ·sr·μm or 0.87 and 1.67 K at 300 K). Additional work has uncovered the source of the calibration error: out-of-field stray light. While analysis continues to characterize the stray light contribution, the vicarious calibration work proceeds. The additional data have not changed the statistical assessment but indicate that the correction (particularly in band 11) is probably only valid for a subset of data. While the stray light effect is small enough in Band 10 to make the data useful across a wide array of applications, the effect in Band 11 is larger and the vicarious results suggest that Band 11 data should not be used where absolute calibration is required.