dmsp

The Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) program designs, builds, launches, and maintains several near polar orbiting, sun synchronous satellites monitoring the meteorological, oceanographic, and solar-terrestrial physics environments.
Each DMSP satellite monitors the atmospheric, oceanographic and solar-geophysical environment of the Earth. The visible and infrared sensors collect images of global cloud distribution across a 3,000 km swath during both daytime and nighttime conditions. The coverage of the microwave imager and sounders are one-half the visible and infrared sensors coverage, thus they cover the polar regions above 60 degrees on a twice daily basis but the equatorial region on a daily basis. The space environmental sensors record along track plasma densities, velocities, composition and drifts.

The Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) monitors meteorological, oceanographic, and solar-terrestrial physics for the United States Department of Defense. The program is now run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The (originally classified) mission of the satellites was revealed in March 1973. They provide cloud cover imagery from polar orbits that are sun-synchronous at nominal altitude of 450 nautical miles (830 km).

20th flight unit of the DMSP Block 5D series, 6th (last) of the Block 5D-3 series.
Main missions: cloud imagery and MW imaging/temperature/humidity sounding.
Substantial contribution to Space weather.

The Defense Meteorological Satellite Program(DMSP) is a Department of Defense(DoD) program run by the Air Force Space
and Missile Systems Center(SMC). The DMSP program designs, builds, launches, and maintains several near polar orbiting, sun
synchronous satellites monitoring the meteorological, oceanographic, and solar-terrestrial physics environments.

DMSP satellites are in a near polar orbiting, sun synchronous orbit at an altitude of approximately 830 Km above the earth. Each
satellite crosses any point on the earth up to two times a day and has an orbital period of about 101 minutes thus providing nearly
complete global coverage of clouds every six hours.