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Come Fly With the Newest Landsat

Visuals and texts by Matt Radcliff, Rob Simmon, Jesse Allen and Holli Riebeek Design by Paul Przyborski

On April 12, 2013, the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) reached its final altitude of 705 kilometers (438 miles). One week later, the satellite’s natural-color imager scanned a swath of land 185-kilometers wide and 9,000 kilometers long (120 by 6,000 miles)—an unusual, unbroken distance considering 70 percent of Earth is covered with water. That flight path—depicted on the globe below—afforded us the chance to assemble 56 still images into a seamless, flyover view of what LDCM saw on April 19, 2013. Stretching from Russia to South Africa, the full mosaic can be viewed in the video above and in various still formats linked below—GigaPan, Google Earth KML, and high-resolution images (read more).

Browse the full resolution using GigaPan View the LDCM swath mosaic in GigaPan using the window below or on the GigaPan website. You can use the controls to zoom in and navigate the image. For more information, use the “help” button in the widget.