Landsat's Global Survey Mission is to establish and execute a data acquisition strategy that ensures repetitive acquisition of observations over the Earth's land mass, coastal boundaries, and coral reefs, supporting work in agriculture, geology, forestry, education, mapping, emergency response and disaster relief, as well as providing a long-term record of natural and human-induced changes to the Earth.

Landsat-8 consists of three key mission and science objectives:

• collect and archive medium resolution multispectral image data affording seasonal coverage of the global land mass
• ensure that Landsat-8 data are sufficiently consistent with data from the earlier Landsat missions in terms of acquisition geometry, calibration, coverage characteristics, spectral characteristics, output product quality, and data availability
• ensure products are available to download within three hours