So the Landsat System is a collection of satellites that have provided continuous information about the earth's surface. There have been 7 launches one of which (landsat 6) failed. The ones we want to focus on in this project are Landsat 5 and Landsat 7, although the strict focus is on landsat 5 since landsat 7 has some malfunctions causing spots on the images. They follow a ground track in a 185km swath that goes from north to south and around the same time every 16 or 18 days it passes over the same spot on the earth.
Landsat 5 combines a Multispectral scanner (MSS) with a Thematic Mapper (TM) to have four spectral bands from visible green to near-infrared and a shortwave infrared and an improve resolution of 120m with the thermal-IR band and of 30m on the rest of the available 6 bands. The .pdf at http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2010/3026/pdf/FS2010-3026.pdf also explains what each band means and what it can be used for. It also gives a pretty good description of landsat 7.
The malfunction I mentioned is described in this document as a "scan line corrector failure". I don't think its that great. There is apparently a way to "fix" it using the data but looking at figure 6 I don't think it is really as accurate as they want it to be.
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