Several Questions I Always Wanted Answered About Remote Sensing, but Didn´t Know Who to Ask

This paper addresses some of the more important questions asked by managers and scientists associated with industry, foreign governments, and U.S. agencies regarding remote sensing. The difficulty in answering these questions is simply that no single view by any one of these groups alone provides enough perspective to do the questions justice. Consequently, this paper reflects an attempt to integrate views expressed by many people regarding the following five questions. First, ¿What is the background, motivation, and mandates for each of the major participants affecting the development of remote sensing markets?¿ Second, ¿What can remote sensing techniques do today?¿ or, ¿What is operationally ready and what is really research?¿ Third, ¿What will be the most important operational contributions of ERTS-A?¿ Fourth, ¿What remote sensing subtleties are particularly important to understand?¿ And finally, ¿How much value is there in remote sensing, for whom and when?¿