As these Landsat 5 images suggest, Las Vegas experienced rapid growth between 1984 and 2009. Building and maintaining a city in a desert raises challenges
for meeting the resident’s water needs, and by the early 2000s, city officials had begun recycling wastewater and paying residents to remove thirsty grass lawns.
On March 1, 2009, NASA’s Landsat 5 satellite turned 25. Originally intended to last just three years, the satellite has provided images of our planet for a quarter of century (see “Landsat 5: The Workhorse of Remote Sensing,” Earth Imaging Journal, Nov/Dec 2008).
With a resolution of roughly 30 meters (100 feet) per image pixel, Landsat 5’s Thematic Mapper doesn’t detect objects as small as individual houses or trees, but the sensor can detect land use changes over a wide area. Las Vegas provides an example of the sensor’s ability to monitor change over time.
These images of the western portion of the Las Vegas metropolitan area show the city’s steady spread into the adjacent desert landscape. Undeveloped land appears along the left edges of the top two images. Here, the land on the city’s outskirts appears in shades of beige and tan, with just a hint of the street grid to come. By 1989, development began to fill the upper left corner—a residential area, complete with curving roads and semicircle streets. In subsequent images, development spreads southward, and by 2004, most of the image shows cityscape, including Interstate 215 passing through southwestern portion of the city.
