Question About Thermal Technology

[deleted-353390]

Hi there! I was thinking how much technology affects our lives today. I am interested mostly about 3 dimensional printing and camera tech. I was just daydreaming of thermal cameras, and thought of this, " What if you could send a thermal camera into orbit? " Would you see small landscape details of Earth, or would you see masses of different temperatures? I am leaning toward mass temperatures, but I am not too sure.

[rmarz]

monsoon2121 - A thermal camera is similar to a digital camera. The thermal sensor, like an optical image sensor has individual sensitive areas similar to what we would call pixels in a traditional digital camera. Today, a medium to high resolution thermal sensor may have 480x640 thermal sites on the sensor, or 307,000 sensitive areas. That is nowhere near the resolution of modern digital cameras having over 20 million pixels. What does that mean? If a high resolution thermal camera in space were to look at the earth, from even low level orbit of a few hundred miles, I'm afraid all they would see would be an average thermal response that would not show any significant level of discriminating thermal definition. Of the 307,000 sites on our theoretical camera, very little detail would be available. Hope this doesn't dissuade you from imagining that a much more superior thermal sensor than exists now might not be available in the future.

Rick Marz