Abstract
Despite the wealth of data produced by previous and current Earth Observation platforms feeding climate models, weather forecasts, disaster monitoring services and countless other applications, the public still lacks the ability to access a live, true colour, global view of our planet, and nudge them towards a realisation of its fragility. The ideas behind commercialization of Earth photography from space has long been dominated by the analytical value of the imagery. What specific knowledge and actionable intelligence can be garnered from these evermore frequent revisits of the planet’s surface? How can I find a market for this analysis? However, what is rarely considered is what is the educational value of the imagery? As students and children become more aware of our several decades of advance in viewing our current planetary state, we should find mechanisms which serve their curiosity, helping to satisfy our children’s simple quest to explore and learn more about what they are seeing. The following study describes the reasons why current GEO and LEO observation platforms are inadequate to provide truly global RGB coverage on an update time-scale of 5-min and proposes an alternative, low-cost, GEO + Molniya 3U CubeSat constellation to perform such an application.
Highlights
In determining the global Ground Sample Distance (GSD) coverage, consideration is given to both the Earth’s curvature causing distortion of pixel sampling away from nadir and overlapping views, as where one grid point is poorly resolved by a single imager it is simultaneously captured in overlapping images at higher resolution
To quantify the quality o erage provided by such a Low Earth Orbiters (LEO) + GEO system, an adaptation of the GSD sim implemented to quantify integrated coverage
Four GOES-R weather satellites costs around USD 10.8 Billion [68]
Summary
EO civilian missions began acquiring sub-100 m in 1972 with Landsat/ERTS and in 1986, sub-15 m imagery with the French SPOT satellite with repeat-pass across-track viewing capable of capturing stereo views. Such imagery has been employed both for generating land cover classification and 3D maps of the first observable surface of the Earth and together with multispectral and hyperspectral imagery have many and varied uses. As with so many human endeavours, this ever-increasing focus on spatial resolution, repeat observation and faster, better cheaper technology developments seeking commercial and scientific applications, EO has lost sight of the wonder of seeing the whole Earth which was first captured by the
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