On March 1, 1984, NASA launched Landsat 5, the agency’s last originally mandated Landsat satellite. Landsat 5 was designed and built at the same time as Landsat 4 and carried the same payload: the Multispectral Scanner System (MSS) and the Thematic Mapper (TM) instruments.
In 1987, the Landsat 5 TDRSS transmitter (Ku-band) failed. This failure made downlinking data acquired outside of the U.S. data acquisition circle (i.e., range of U.S. ground receiving antennas) impossible; Landsat 5 has no on-board data recorder to record acquired data for later downlink.
The MSS instrument was turned off in August of 1995.
In November 2011, the TM instrument stopped acquiring images due to a rapidly degrading electronic component. A few months later, engineers turned the MSS instrument back on, and implemented new capabilities to ingest the raw instrument data at the ground station.
On Dec. 21, 2012, the USGS announced Landsat 5 would be decommissioned after the failure of a redundant gyroscope. The satellite carries three gyroscopes for attitude control and needs two to maintain control.
Outliving its three-year design life, Landsat 5 delivered high-quality, global data of Earth’s land surface for 28 years and 10 months, officially setting a new Guinness World Records title for “Longest-operating Earth observation satellite.”