Category talk:Earth observation satellites

Hi all! This page is rather confusing to me, and probably unhelpful to readers who are not specialists in this field. Here are the problems I see:

- There is no generic description of the field to start with.

- Only two 'subcategories' are defined, and these are in fact rather similar or overlapping.

- The 'Pages in category' that are listed contain a heterogeneous mixture of platforms (e.g., Aqua, Aura, Envisat, NPOESS or Terra) and instruments (e.g., MERIS, MISR, MODIS), not to mention particular measurement approaches (ozone monitoring) and topics that are only remotely (no pun intended) connected to satellites (object oriented techniques).

I'd like to suggest the following (which may require some help/action by a Wikipedia administrator, as I don't seem to see or get access to the source of this page):

Rename this page 'Earth Observation (EO)' (note the capitalization, which is widely used in this field). The word 'satellites' should be removed as the actual and intended contents are much broader than that anyway.

Delete the current two subcategories and move the corresponding pages to the current pool in preparation for a further re-assignment.

Create at least the following new subcategories:

- Space segment
  - Launchers
  - Platforms
  - Instruments
- Ground segment
  - Algorithms
  - Products
- Applications
  - Meteorology and climate
  - Agriculture and forestry
  - Oceanography and fisheries
  - Land use, land cover and their changes
  - Environment degradation and sustainable development
  - Urbanism, industry and transportation
  - Military and security issues

failed, decommissioned, historical etc... 80.186.247.234 (talk) 05:48, 27 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

and offer at least a short description of the intended content of each (I can help). Of course, many more topics could be added, requiring an even finer overall structure, but we'll come to that if and when needed. In fact, a number of pages already exist elsewhere in Wikipedia that could be linked to this (or an alternative equivalent) structure.

Move the existing pages to the appropriate subcategories (I'll be glad to help with that once the overall structure is agreed upon and in place).

Comments and suggestions (as well as help in setting up this major reorganization) will be greatly appreciated. Cheers, Michel M Verstraete 20:49, 18 May 2006 (UTC).[reply]