This is insightful and well-informed. There are also a lot of Earth-orbiting instruments that help us understand weather and climate (too many to list; way bey

This is insightful and well-informed. There are also a lot of Earth-orbiting instruments that help us understand weather and climate (too many to list; way beyond taking Landsat-style pictures), the recent lunar missions (LRO, GRAIL), several solar missions (Stereo, SDO), and cosmology/astrophysics (Planck, Spitzer, Chandra).