The history of remote sensing is more or less a 50-year long series of events like this: -Sensor system is designed and launched for specific mission goal -So

The history of remote sensing is more or less a 50-year long series of events like this: -Sensor system is designed and launched for specific mission goal -Someone finds an unexpected and important use for the data, completely unrelated to the original mission goal -Eventually a specialized platform for the unexpected use case is developed and launched -Someone finds a new use case for this data And the process repeats. LANDSAT 1 (formerly ERTS-A) was originally conceived to find undiscovered deposits of minerals. Turned out it was useful for a hell of a lot more than that.