Landsat-8 Operational Land Imager Design, Characterization and Performance

The Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat-8 represents a generational change from heritage Landsat instruments in its design, while it maintains data continuity with the 40+ year Landsat data archive. It preserves the 30-m ground sample distance, 185-km swath width and VIS/NIR/SWIR spectral bands. Furthermore, data continuity resulted from extensive pre-launch and on-orbit calibration and characterization campaigns. This paper presents an overview of the OLI design, the pre-launch characterization results and the on-orbit performance.