LANDSAT 2
Country: United States of America
Live Position
Ground Track · Last 90 Minutes
Upcoming Passes · Over Your Location
About This Satellite
Landsat 2 launched on January 22, 1975, continuing the land-imaging record established by Landsat 1. It carried the same RBV and MSS instrument types. Its importance was continuity: repeated observations could turn a single view of a landscape into a record of how that landscape changed.
From satellite scenes to crop inventories
USGS connects this era with the Large Area Crop Inventory Experiment, LACIE, involving NASA, USDA, and NOAA. The programme investigated large-scale crop monitoring, particularly wheat. This was an application of interpreted observations, not a spacecraft directly counting every crop or reporting a finished harvest forecast.
End of imaging and decommissioning are different dates
Yaw-control problems ended Landsat 2 operations after February 28, 1982; formal decommissioning followed on July 27, 1983. A mission timeline should preserve both events. Neither date is the epoch of the orbital elements displayed in this catalog.
Mission reference: USGS: Landsat 2 history and agricultural applications. Editorial review: .
Eighteen days refers to repeating the ground pattern
The original mission used an 18-day repeat cycle and the WRS-1 path-and-row system. Its orbit took roughly 103 minutes. Those are different intervals: one describes a revolution, the other the recurring ground pattern used to organise image acquisitions.
Reference: USGS: Landsat 2 orbit and WRS-1 reference system.
Find observations rather than extrapolating from the track
The USGS MSS archive includes Landsat 1-5 Collection 2 Level-1 scenes searchable through EarthExplorer or GloVis. Search by the place and historical acquisition period of interest. The presence of a scene in the archive, including its quality information, is the evidence of an observation; today's catalog trajectory is not.
Reference: USGS EROS: historical MSS data access.
Reading this orbital snapshot
Based on TLE epoch: 2026-09-04. Estimated altitude ranges from 897 km at perigee to 911 km at apogee, a difference of 14 km. The orbital period is about 103.1 minutes. Eccentricity 0.00098 indicates a nearly circular path. In a two-body approximation, perigee speed is 1.00 times apogee speed. These are mean-element estimates, not instantaneous measurements. Distance per orbit uses an ellipse approximation.
Saved build snapshot. If a valid TLE is retrieved, this explanation and the orbit panel update together. Otherwise this dated snapshot is retained.
Ground track is not sensor coverage
An inclination of 99.05 degrees implies approximate geocentric ground-track limits of 81.0 degrees north and south. This is a retrograde orbit, moving against the direction of Earth rotation. The plotted line marks the point beneath the object. It does not represent camera coverage, radio reception, or a guaranteed visible pass.
Accuracy and missing information
The introductory record describes the build snapshot. The orbital snapshot explanation and orbit panel share any successfully retrieved TLE; check the displayed epoch. Reentered objects retain historical data only. Mission history is not rewritten by TLE updates. TLE/SGP4 positions are predictions and can change after maneuvers or updated observations. The 14-day stale-data cutoff is a display safeguard, not an accuracy guarantee. Local passes are geometric predictions, not a visibility forecast. No verified operator or mission status means unknown, not active. Do not use this catalog for collision avoidance or operational flight decisions.
Catalog sources: CelesTrak SATCAT: NORAD 7615 · GCAT: S07615 (source update 2026 Sep 4 2345:57). Supplementary metadata: SatNOGS DB, retrieved 2026-09-05T12:57:25.375Z. Page assembled 2026-09-15. GCAT phase codes describe trajectory phases, not mission health.
Learn more: TLE data · Perigee and apogee · Ground tracks · JOT (Jewawud Live Orbital Map)