Interesting speculations, but that's not how these environmental monitoring satellites work. They are set up to get global coverage with this instrument every

Interesting speculations, but that's not how these environmental monitoring satellites work. They are set up to get global coverage with this instrument every 5 days. The orbit is chosen so that this happens, to enable long-term time series of vegetation, land cover, etc., as you note. It's a successor to other satellites like SPOT, and a competitor/complement to NASA satellites like MODIS.