High resolution mapping with small satellites

Kurzfassung

Civil space-borne Earth surface mapping started in 1972 with an 80 m GSD provided by ERTS, later renamed to Landsat-1. Nowadays, the GSD approaches 1 m or even less. This trend was supported by the improvments in diverse fields of technology as for instance optics, mechanics and materials, electronics, signal processing, communications and navigation. The space-borne mapping systems always attempted to achieve the highest ground resolution possible with the available technology at the given time. SAR systems are an alternative to passive optical systems; they also benefit from the technology improvements. But the most promising prospects for high resolution mapping with small satellites are connected with passive optical systems, especially push-broom systems. The paper tries to analyse how far can we go in decreasing the GSD using instruments and spacecrafts decreasing in size, mass, and power consumption.