Today ten years ago the USGS started opening the full Landsat image archive as open data. Although this was not the first release of satellite imagery as open data – a selection of Landsat images was already opened before and MODIS data was likewise already usable by everyone years before it can today still be without reservations called the historic decision that most strongly shaped the satellite image landscape of today.

Here one of the early Landsat images from the Landsat 1 Multispectral Scanner System from 1972. Since MSS did not record a blue spectral band this uses a synthetic blue channel estimated from the other spectral bands (i wrote about this in the context of ASTER images before).