Launched on 15 April 1999, Landsat 7's primary goal is to refresh the global archive of satellite photos, providing up-to-date and cloud-free images.

The main instrument on board Landsat 7 is the Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+), a whisk broom scanner image sensor.

The assessment included input from scientists from USGS, NASA, and the Landsat 7 science team, and concluded that the results were still usable for many scientific applications and that there were several potential approaches to compensate for the missing data.

Other commercial simulated true color 15-metre global imagery products built from the NASA Landsat 7 imagery include TerraColor from Earthstar Geographics, TruEarth (found in Google Earth and Google Maps) from TerraMetrics, BrightEarth from ComputaMaps, simulated natural color from Atlogis and a product of i-cubed used in NASA WorldWind.

Landsat 7 required regular orbital maneuvers to ensure that the local mean time (LMT) data acquisitions were maintained.

On April 6, 2022, the science mission was suspended and the image sensor was placed into standby mode as the satellite's orbit was lowered.

[11] On May 5, 2022, imaging was once again resumed, to assess the utility of imagery collected at the new lower orbit and earlier equatorial crossing time.