Landsat View: Istanbul, Turkey

Istanbul has been a bustling trade city for thousands of years. In this 1975 image, taken by Landsat, the city centers on the Golden Horn the estuary that flows into the Bosporus Straight at the center of the scene. Shown in false color, vegetation is red, urban areas are gray, and water appears black. A bridge built in 1973 to connect the Asian and European sides of Istanbul is barely visible.

By 2011, Istanbul's population had exploded from 2 to 13 million people, and the city has gone through a dramatic expansion. This Landsat 5 image shows densely packed urban areas stretching along the Sea of Marmara and up the Bosporus Straight where a second bridge built in 1988 now crosses the water.

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NASA and the U.S. Department of the Interior through the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) jointly manage Landsat, and the USGS preserves a 40-year archive of Landsat images that is freely available over the Internet. The next Landsat satellite, now known as the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) and later to be called Landsat 8, is scheduled for launch in 2013.

In honor of Landsat’s 40th anniversary in July 2012, the USGS released the LandsatLook viewer – a quick, simple way to go forward and backward in time, pulling images of anywhere in the world out of the Landsat archive.

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NASA Goddard Space Flight Center enables NASA’s mission through four scientific endeavors: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Solar System Exploration, and Astrophysics. Goddard plays a leading role in NASA’s accomplishments by contributing compelling scientific knowledge to advance the Agency’s mission.

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