Question

Describe in brief the functioning of push broom scanner.

Answer 1

The push broom scanners consist of a number of detectors which are equivalent to the number obtained by dividing the swath of the sensor by the size of the spatial resolution. In push broom scanner, all detectors are linearly arrayed and each detector collects the energy reflected by the ground cell (pixel) dimensions of 20 meters at a nadir’s view.

For example, the swath of High-Resolution Visible Radiometer – 1 (HRVR -1) of the French remote sensing satellite SPOT is 60 km and the spatial resolution is 20 metres. If we divide 60 km x 1000 metres/20 metres, we get a number of 3000 detectors that are deployed in SPOT HRV – 1 sensor.