Glossary

The Operational Land Imager is carried by the Landsat 8 satellite. It measures in the visible, near infrared, and short wave infrared portions of the spectrum. Its images have 15-meter (49 ft.) panchromatic and 30-meter multi-spectral spatial resolutions along a 185 km (115 miles) wide swath.

For more information see: NASA Landsat science - Landsat 8

The OLI-2 instrument is carried by the Landsat 9 satellite. It provides visible and near infrared / shortwave infrared (VNIR/SWIR) imagery consistent with previous Landsat spectral, spatial, radiometric and geometric qualities.

The OLI-2 instrument includes an optical telescope, Focal Plane Array / Focal Plane Electronics (FPA/FPE), calibration hardware, and instrument support electronics. OLI-2 provides data for nine spectral bands with a maximum ground sampling distance (GSD), both in-track and cross track, of 30 m (98 ft) for all bands except the panchromatic band, which has a 15 m (49 ft) GSD.

For more information see: NASA Landsat science - Landsat 9 instruments

Sensitive to many wavelengths of light. 

An abbreviation of ‘picture element’. It is the minimum size area on the ground detectable by a remote sensing device. The size varies depending on the type of sensor. 

A planar unit, directly related to forest cover, representing the horizontal distribution of forest cover when determined from above, such as by LiDAR or spectral satellite.

An orbit with an orbital inclination of near 90 degrees where the satellite ground track will cross both polar regions once during each orbit. The term describes the near-polar orbits of a spacecraft.

Also known as Postgres, it is an open source object-relational database management system with an emphasis on extensibility and standards compliance. It can handle workloads ranging from small single-machine applications to large internet-facing applications with many concurrent users. 

The generation of some form of output as the result of a set of actions, which may include sub-processes. 

A categorical term applied to describe the output from a process. Typically, a product has an associated product definition which contains the product description and specification.

The programming language used to develop the Data Cube. It is easy to use while still allowing high performance access and processing capabilities.

For more information, see Python.