Landsat program
The Thermal InfraRed Sensor (TIRS), built by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, conducts thermal imaging and supports emerging applications such as evapotranspiration rate measurements for water management. The TIRS focal plane uses gallium arsenide (GaAs) Quantum Well Infrared Photodetector arrays (known as QWIPs) for detecting the infrared radiation — a first for the Landsat program. The TIRS data will be registered to OLI data to create radiometrically, geometrically, and terrain-corrected 12-bit Landsat 8 data products. Like OLI, TIRS employs a pushbroom sensor design with a 185 km swath width. Data for two long wavelength infrared bands will be collected with TIRS. This provides data continuity with Landsat 7's single thermal infrared band and adds a second.