Earth observation
Using satellites to image and measure the Earth's surface, atmosphere and oceans, for science, agriculture, defence or commerce.
Earth observation is the part of the space industry whose customers are almost entirely on the ground, which makes it unusually sensitive to price rather than prestige. What matters commercially is not resolution alone but revisit rate - how often you can see the same place - and that is a constellation problem, not a telescope problem. It is also why so many of these satellites fly in sun-synchronous orbits: comparable lighting is what turns a picture into a measurement.
Earth observation is visible in our tracker both as a mission label (6 missions classified that way) and, more meaningfully, in orbit choice: 36 missions target sun-synchronous orbits, the lighting-stable band this sector depends on, and 47 more go to polar orbits.
- 2026-09-15 Vega-C | Sentinel-3C & FLEX Go for Launch
- 2026-03-05 Electron | BlackSky Global 34 Success
- 2026-01-31 Long March 2C | AlSat-3B Success
- 2026-09-05Telesat Taps Cailabs for Optical Links as KSAT Tests Hybrid RF Relay
- 2026-09-04Rocket Lab launches Synspective's 11th StriX SAR satellite to 575 km orbit
- 2026-09-04Canadian Space Agency opens smartEarth Enabler stream with up to $3 million for universities
- 2026-09-02Teledyne Passes 1,000 Orbital Imaging Sensors; Lunar Station Taps NASA Data
- 2026-08-31Week in Space: Roman’s Liftoff and a Rapidly Shifting Orbital Order — Week in Space (2026-08-23 → 2026-08-31)
- 2026-08-30ESA fuels FLEX satellite ahead of 15 September Vega‑C launch to map photosynthesis from space
Remote sensing, which is the underlying technique and includes aircraft and ground instruments, and astronomy, which points the same kind of hardware in the opposite direction.