01. The Impossible Swath
Introduces the design pressure: small ground pixels, compact thermal-IR hardware, and a very wide fire-watch swath.
Storyboard handoff
Mission survey storyboard
A ten-panel technical manga plan that turns the scan-mirror heritage survey into a stakeholder-readable sequence: wide-swath need, flight heritage, pushbroom counter-case, calibration, system burden, and breadboard risk retirement.
Panel sequence
The comic format is a communication artifact, not a new technical claim.
02. The Archive Opens
Frames Landsat, MODIS, AIRS, HIRS, IASI, and related scanners as operational heritage to interrogate, not copy.
03. Three Ways To Sweep A Planet
Separates whiskbroom, pushbroom, and spin-assisted scanning before comparing their system-level costs.
04. The Fire-Relevant Witness
Uses Sentinel-3 SLSTR as the strongest public fire-relevant anchor for thermal scanning and calibration coupling.
05. The Pushbroom Countercase
Keeps Landsat 8 and 9 in the argument so the scan mirror is treated as a trade, not a default answer.
06. The Edge Of The Swath
Makes the off-nadir penalties visible: stretched pixels, atmospheric path length, projection, and radiometric edge cost.
07. The Mechanism Becomes The Mission
Shows the scanner as an optical, mechanical, electrical, thermal, and software subsystem with calibrated failure modes.
08. Calibration Every Cycle
Connects scan motion to Earth, cold-space, and blackbody views so calibration is part of the observing architecture.
09. Total System Burden
Compares scan-mirror risk against detector size, cooling, jitter, geolocation, calibration, lifetime, and fixed-camera alternatives.
10. Baseline, Not Verdict
Ends with the disciplined recommendation: breadboard the scan-mirror path while keeping pushbroom and multi-camera options alive.