Lecture 6 - Major Spaceborne remote sensing systems Flashcards
Landsat Programme Info
Primary mission: to map Earth’s terrestrial and coastal areas
Landsat Temporal resolution
16 days
Landsat Spatial resolution
30 metres
Landsat Wavebands
Visible and IR
Landsat data acquisition
Satellite in polar orbit with altitude of 705km
Swath of 185km
16 day repeat cycle
Landsat Sensors
- Return Beam vidicon camera RBV
- Multi spectral scanner MSS
- Thematic mapper TM
- Enhanced thematic mapper ETM +
- Operation Land Imager OLI
- Thermal Infrared Sensor TIRS
Advantages of Landsat Sensors
All have similar spectral wavebands
Allows for long-term timeseries analysis
ESAs Sentinel
Active Sensor
Sentinel 1 -
Synthetic Arperture imaging
All weather, day/night applications
Sentinel 2 -
Multispectral imaging
Land applications: urbans, forest agriculture
Sentinel Temporal resolution
10 days
Advantage of Sentinel 2s ‘s Multispectral instrument
Contrains wavebands in “red edge”
So can analyse vegetation chlorophyll content
Planet Labs
Cubesats
10x10x30 centimetres
Cheap to launch
Planet Labs Spatial resolution
3-5m, due to low orbit height
Planet Labs spectral bands?
4-8
Planet Labs Image swath?
32km
Advantages of Planet Labs Cubesats
Frequent global coverage due to having hundreds of satellites
High revisit time - 30 hours
NASAs Terra and Aqua Satellites
Have sensors to observe total earth system and effects of natural and human-induced changes on global environment.
MODIS
Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS)
- Observations of land, oceans, and atmosphere
- 3 different spatial resolutions
- 2 bands between 0.620 micro and 0.876 micro at 250m
- 5 bands between 0.459 micro and 2.155 micro at 500m
- 29 bands between 0.405 micro and 14.385 micro at 1km
