Timeline for Why don't commercial airplanes carry Earth-observing instruments?
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| Dec 3, 2018 at 14:00 | comment | added | Manu H | For comparison between aircraft and satellite in general, you may search for atmospheric satelite here. | |
| Dec 3, 2018 at 10:58 | comment | added | gerrit | @mins In theory, yes — but it'd have to be commanded to overfly a specific spot for an instrument with a narrow swath width to observe it. I don't know how precise they can hit it (question for Space Exploration), the swath width of the CALIOP LIDAR is less than 100 metre. I don't know if this type of commanding happens with scientific satellites, though (it certainly does with commercial Earth observation satellites). | |
| Dec 2, 2018 at 20:22 | comment | added | mins | @gerrit: I agree partially, the fact an instrument works with small field of view doesn't mean the vehicle is not able to overfly (zenith) the whole area between latitudes allowed by the inclination. Two consecutive bands may not overlap though. E.g. Sun synchronous Terra. | |
| Dec 2, 2018 at 12:17 | comment | added | gerrit | In contrary satellites in low orbit (which are therefore not geostationary) see the Earth rotating below them and cover easily most of the planet area (specially polar orbit ones)., that's not necessarily accurate for most Earth observation satellites. A radar on a sun-synchronous satellite such as Cloudsat, has a narrow swath width (~1 km) and a repeated ground pattern, so it doesn't see the entire world either. It's true for passive sensors, and although satellites do reach all regions of the world, nadir-looking active sensors do not easily cover the entire planet. | |
| Nov 29, 2018 at 19:34 | comment | added | Camilo Rada | I get your points. But you can build another even longer list of the difficulties of operating and instrument from a satellite in contrast to an airplane. The cost of the down time that an extra system might require is an interesting one. Also, regarding to coverage, many satellites don't have storage capacity and can only rely information back to earth when they are over a ground station. Therefore, they can only really observe the terrain around the ground station. For a long time brazilian, indian and corean satelites were ony observing their own countries. Still they sent a satellite. | |
| Nov 29, 2018 at 17:44 | history | edited | mins | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Nov 29, 2018 at 14:21 | comment | added | Jimmy | Hmmm. But the question is not about the differences between satellite capabilities and aircraft-based capabilities. It’s about technical and legal limitations of the working with airlines. Thus, this network is more appropriate than the space.se network. | |
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| Nov 29, 2018 at 13:52 | history | answered | mins | CC BY-SA 4.0 |