FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS
The immediate future will see the launch of several new instruments. In 1991 ERS-1 will place the
first synthetic aperture radar in orbit since 1978. It will be a C-band radar. The following year an L-
band radar will go aloft along with an advanced optical instrument on JERS-1. Radarsat will launch
an advanced C-band SAR in 1995. The SPOT and Landsat programs are committed to continue
with SPOT 3 and 4, and Landsat 6 which will carry instruments which are either the same or slight
improvements over their predecessors.
Optimal use of remote sensing technology for operational monitoring of the earth in the future will
hinge around the planning and implementation of an integrated information delivery system. This
system must be designed to acquire those measurements of the atmosphere and the surface
which are necessary to understand and monitor the state of equilibrium of the earth's ecosystems.
Serious questions with respect to what these measurements are, how they will be made, which
ones must be made simultaneously, and how they are to be processed stored and distributed
must now be addressed. This task is clearly a multinational one. The design of future systems
must be based on answers to these questions. The requirements for information will drive the
design of the processing system, sensing instruments, spacecraft and orbits. Instruments and
spacecraft will be designed to serve the need for information, and new instruments such as the
imaging spectrometer will be placed in orbit. These instruments have the potential to map surface
cover materials with a high degree of specificity [Goetz et al, 1985]. They produce prodigious
amounts of data, however, so it is important to develop routine rigorous methods which are largely
automated to analyze and extract information from the output of such instruments. This in turn will
create a need for more sophisticated algorithms to handle the large quantities of data. The
challenge to the scientific community is to create the knowledge base necessary to accomplish all
of these tasks in a timely manner.
REFERENCES
Cumming, I, D. Hawkins, L. Gray [1990], All-Weather Mapping with Interferometric Radar,
Proceedings of the 23rd International Symposium on Remote Sensing of Environment,
Environmental Institute of Michigan, Bangkok, April 1990.
Friedmann, D.E. [1981], - Operational Resampling for Correcting Images to a Geocoded
Format, Proceedings of the 15th ERIM International Symposium on Remote Sensing of
Environment, Ann Arbor, Mich., May, 1981, pp. 195-212.
Goetz, A.F.H., G. Vane, J.E. Solomon, B.N. Rock [1985], - Imaging Spectrometry for
Earth Remote Sensing, Science, Vol. 228, pp. 1147-1153, 1985.
Guertin, F.E. and E. Shaw [1981], - Definition and Potential of Geocoded Satellite Imagery
Products, Proceedings of the 7th Canadian Symposium on Remote Sensing, Winnipeq, Man.
September 8-11, 1981, pp. 384-394
Im, Eastwood [1990], System Concepts for High-Resolution Land and Ice Topographic
Mapping Altimeters, Proceedings, ISPRS International Symposium on Primary Data Acquisition,
Manaus, Brazil, June 24-29, 1990, International Archives of Photogrammetry and Remote
Sensing, Vol. 28, Part 1, pp. 64-70.
Kauffman, D.S. and S.A. Wood [1987], -Digital Elevation Model Extraction from Stereo
Satellite Images, Proceedings of the I.E.E.E. 1987 International Geoscience and Remote
Sensing Symposium (IGARSS ’87), Ann Arbor, Mich., May 18-21, 1987, pp. 349-352.
Li, F.K., and R.M. Goldstein, [1990], Studies of Multibaseline Spaceborne Interferometric
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