Landsat View: Western Suburbs of Chicago, Illinois

Forty miles west of downtown Chicago, the Fox River meanders its way through what has become the westernmost reaches of metropolitan Chicago, where the sprawling metropolis meets the hinterlands. While Chicago itself has seen a seven percent population decline during the last decade, the population of its metropolitan region, "Chicagoland," has steadily increased.

These two natural-color Landsat 5 images acquired a quarter-century apart (on May 2, 1985, and May 23, 2010), stand witness to the soaring growth of this region. Aurora, Illinois’ second largest city, is the silvery-green region to the left hugging the Fox River, just south of the I-88 (North is to the right in this image); Carpentersville is found on the rightmost side, north of the I-90. From 1985 to 2010 a development explosion can been seen as the browns of pasture lands give way to silvery-green suburban areas and large white-colored business districts spring up along and east of the river. A major expansion of Dupage Airport appears in the middle of the 2010 image, and the circular-shaped region north of the I-88 and east of the Fox River, visible on both images, is the Department of Energy’s Fermilab.

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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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