Two free tools for choosing a satellite

There are hundreds of Earth observation satellites, and choosing one for a
piece of research means answering two questions that are surprisingly hard to
answer: **which satellites could see this, and which of their bands actually
responds to the thing I care about?**

The USGS publishes a free tool for each.

Which satellites exist — the Online Compendium

The Earth Observing Satellites Online Compendium,
built with the Joint Agency Commercial Imagery Evaluation programme, is a
searchable database of past, current and planned remote sensing satellites.

You can filter by spectral resolution, data availability, launch year and
basic system specifications, and the results give name, status, orbit and
launch year in a table.

Each entry opens into a fuller description of the platform.

The part that makes it trustworthy is the link out to every JACIE
assessment of an orbiting system, so a user can independently check what data
exists and how good it is rather than taking the entry's word for it. It is
updated frequently, which a database of a fast-moving industry has to be.

Which band — the Spectral Characteristics Viewer

The ECCOE Spectral Characteristics Viewer,
from the EROS Cal/Val Center of Excellence, answers the second question. It
plots relative spectral response curves — how strongly a given band
responds at each wavelength — for a growing list of civil and commercial
sensors, so they can be compared directly.

Curves can be exported for further analysis. More usefully, sensor responses
can be plotted against target spectra from the USGS Spectroscopy
Laboratory and the ECOSTRESS Spectral Library — which is how you find out
whether a band lines up with the reflectance of the material you are trying to
detect.

As of 2024 the viewer carries a sensor library, a target library and a
response calculation, covering visible to short-wave infrared — 0.38 to 2.51
micrometres.

Sources

Written from the U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet *Earth observation remote
sensing tools*, a work of the United States government in the public domain.
The Online Compendium is described in Clauson and others (2024).