An astronaut's eye view

Henry Spencer wrote:
In article .com,
wrote:
question is just how big the market is. Quite possibly the biggest use
for it would be something nobody has yet thought of...

In the case of most earth observation satellites there may have been
surprises in the data, like the ozone hole, but have any actually
turned out to be useful for something not previously thought of?

Oh, yes. No single hugely-lucrative development, mind you, but lots of
modest surprises in what can be done with the overhead view. For example,
there has been considerable work done by the FAA (!) on using NASA's
ozone-mapping instruments to track sulfur dioxide -- turns out that the
wavelengths used for ozone sensing pick up SO2 as well -- because it's a
good tracer of plumes from volcanic eruptions, whose ash content can
endanger airliners, and which are difficult to track otherwise.
--
"Think outside the box -- the box isn't our friend." | Henry Spencer
-- George Herbert |

Glad I asked, that is a good example. There was a network program
a few months ago that went into all the mysterious happenings on a
flight in the eastern Pacific, fireballs behind the engines before they
failed and a fog over the windshield. It wasn't untill the last ten
minutes that these were revealed to be the effects of flying into high
altitude volcanic ash. Still this use could have plausably been
predicted by someone who knew that the two gasses had spectral
characteristics in common.
With some brainstorming maybe an unexpected use for multiple
cammeras tracking seperate areas of interest at different angles of
inclination could be uncovered, it might be what gets such a satellite
launched in the first place.