United Launch Alliance successfully launched NASA's Landsat 9 satellite on Monday, September, 27th at 2:12 p.m. EDT from notoriously foggy Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Our photographer Pauline Acalin was on-site to capture the mission.

The first Landsat satellite was launched in 1972 and NASA and its partners have since continued to operate a Landsat in orbit to capture imagery of our planet’s surface and changes in land usage patterns. This data allows scientists to track "agricultural productivity, forest extent and health, water quality, coral reef habitat health, and glacier dynamics," according to NASA.

Landsat 9 was built to monitor the Earth’s land surface and "will be our new eyes in the sky when it comes to observing our changing planet,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's associate administrator for science.

“Working in tandem with the other Landsat satellites, as well as our European Space Agency partners who operate the Sentintel-2 satellites, we are getting a more comprehensive look at Earth than ever before. With these satellites working together in orbit, we’ll have observations of any given place on our planet every two days. This is incredibly important for tracking things like crop growth and helping decision-makers monitor the overall health of Earth and its natural resources.”

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson says that "with a 50-year data bank to build on, Landsat 9 will take this historic and invaluable global program to the next level. We look forward to working with our partners at the U.S. Geological Survey and the Department of the Interior again on Landsat Next, because we never stop advancing our work to understand our planet.”