Template talk:Satellite and spacecraft instruments

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It would be great to have satellites with thermal sensors more outstanding (I hesitate to hack the template...). thanks Bumbulski (talk) 22:55, 3 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

What does 'accultation' means? (As in "Radio science (planetary accultation)") — Preceding unsigned comment added by 189.230.87.46 (talk) 00:00, 14 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Looks like a spelling mistake, it should be planetary occultation. ChiZeroOne (talk) 00:04, 14 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

This template mostly lists extraterrestrial instruments, which makes the list small enough to fit in a template. There are also a handful of Earth observing instruments listed there, but without clear criteria, that would make the list far too large to fit in a template. What is the aim here? Should we include Earth instruments, and if so, based on what criteria? Or should the template strictly list only extraterrestrial instruments? --Gerrit ^CUTEDH 10:25, 22 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for bringing this up. This template is clearly aimed at interplanetary probes, although (and especially for earlier missions) there is a lot of overlap between orbital and interplanetary probes in terms of experiment load. To be honest, this thing seems kind of useless, and I note that it's not included in most of the spacecraft it references.

What makes it particularly useless is that, though it lists the type of experiments, it doesn't reference the destination. Listing ten disparate craft that happened to use roughly similar instruments on wildly different targets is pointless. Also, the experiment types are general, without indicating, for instance, what frequencies they are sensitive to.

In short, I'll likely never use this thing, and I'm one of the main people who would ever use it. :) --Neopeius (talk) 13:21, 22 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

There may be some use for it, but rather for technical than for scientific interest. I was looking for an overview of radars around other planets and found it here. So I think it's a bit too strong to call it "particularly useless", but as a navigation template it's not very useful. --Gerrit ^CUTEDH 10:31, 23 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]