[AR] weather (was Re: Future Exploration Policy)
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2018 15:27:57 -0500 (EST)
On Fri, 23 Feb 2018, Jake Anderson wrote:
Cluster sat's are probably going to replace GEO weather sats eventually.
Why build one big giant sat, then sit it 30,000km away and looking at a
big angle at what your interested in when you can build 10 smaller sats,
sit them 800km away and get true global coverage whilst looking straight
down.
Weather satellites *started out* in LEO, and there are still LEO weather
satellites. But they don't do the same job as the GSO weather satellites.
The GSO birds were added because it's quite valuable to have a view of the
*entire* Earth every half hour or so, not least to supply context for the
closeup views from the LEO sats. You'll need rather more than ten LEO
sats to match that; the usable field of view from 800km is not that wide.
By the way, the GSO weather satellites are not huge. It's not clear that
it's worth the trouble of deploying and operating a sizable constellation
of LEO satellites to replace them. For some things, GSO is the right
answer.
Henry
Other related posts:
- » [AR] weather (was Re: Future Exploration Policy) - Henry Spencer