Mission Operations Center
 All Command and Control of the spacecraft takes place from the Mission Operations Center (MOC) located at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt Maryland. Functions that take place within the MOC include planning and scheduling, health and safety telemetry processing and analysis, spacecraft command and control, spacecraft subsystem trending, anomaly isolation, investigation, and resolution, and sustaining engineering. Unlike many past missions, flight dynamics (orbit maintenance) functions such as maneuver planning, planning aid generation, and orbit determination are contained within the MOC. The MOC is staffed by the Honeywell Flight Operations Team (FOT) which is comprised of console analysts, mission planners, subsystem engineers, and supervisor/managers. A view of the MOC is shown below. For an different picture of the MOC, click here.

Communications
 Ground sites in South Dakota (The Landsat Ground Station, or LGS) and Austrailia (ASN) are used to capture data from the spacecraft. LGS is located at the USGS EROS Data Center in Sioux Falls South Dakota. The ASN site is located at the ACRES facility in Alice Springs, Austrailia. These sites receive both the Science data (via X-band RF link) and the spacecraft housekeeping data (via S-band RF link). LGS also provides tracking services and a command link to the spacecraft. LGS and ASN send all housekeeping data to the MOC in realtime for immediate health and saftey monitoring. Science data is sent to the L7 Processing System (co-located with LGS in Sioux Falls). The ASN 9 meter antenna is shown at right. The NASA Tracking Data and Relay Satellites (TDRS)is also used to provide housekeeping support for L7.

Ground sites in Poker Flat Alaska (DataLynx), and Svalbard Norway (SGS) are used as backup sites in time when extra ground resources are necessary to fulfill mission objectives.

All ground sites are equipped with 9-11 meter antennas and are capable of receiving both S-band (Houskeeping) and X-band (Science) data simultaneously. Housekeeping data is downlinked to the ground sites at 4 Kbps.
Science Data Handling
 Science data is downlinked at either 150 or 300 Mbps to the ground sites. Each 150 Mbps stream is made up of 75 Mbps i and q channels and downlinked at different X-band frequencies. Science data downlinked to ASN is captured on tape and shipped to LGS. LGS forwards all received data (either real-time or via tape) to the Landsat Processing System (LPS). Data is processed to level zero and passed to the DAAC for permanent archive. To order data products from USGS, click here.
Click below to see a context diagram that shows the interaction between the different elements.

System Elements and Context Diagrams

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This page was last updated on May 1, 2003.
You may send e-mail to us at the following address
Tom Cooke at thomas.cooke@gsfc.nasa.gov