LANDSAT RBV Data held by the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), Brazil

INPE's only receiving station for Landsat RBV was located in Cuiaba, MT (geographic coordinates approx. 15.5S/56.0W). Data were acquired routinely over the entire range during the lifetime of Landsat 3. This means therefore the twin-camera, panchromatic version of the RBV. Some gaps exist, some of them several months long, related mostly to station downtimes caused by lightning. The RBV tapes recorded at Cuiaba were air shipped to the processing and distribution center in Cachoeira Paulista, SP, where they are kept. The holdings (not all of them processed to film) are estimated to be around 100,000 images. Demand for RBV products experienced a brief peak while they were a novelty with higher resolution than MSS (30m vs. 80m), but decreased quickly as the all-analog processing system allowed no digital products and the shading effect could not be effectively corrected, yielding poor quality images. Requests practically vanished after the Thematic Mapper came into scene, and RBV products were taken off the INPE products list in late 1984. The processing system was dismantled in early 1991. Some 50,000 photographic originals are still kept, but no intention of resuming distribution exists in principle.