[ORioN63]

Disclaimer: My opinion.

I am fairly sure, no one is taking pictures of the whole earth, in 20 minutes intervals in a sufficiently high resolution to pick out an airplane. Specially one, flying over water.

For reference, ISS at its height ~400km, can see roughly 3% of the Earth's surface. This is without any kind of lens.

If someone has any kind of evidence, showing it otherwise, it would be great to see.

[parsimo2010]

Nobody is going to offer evidence otherwise. Here’s a quick estimate for what you’re talking about: the Earth is about 500 trillion square meters of surface area. An image where each pixel was a meter would be a 500 TP (terapixel) image. Even with impressive compression the downlink requirements alone are insane, even ignoring all the other issues that would have to be worked out. Edit: just for fun, I estimated the file size- likely between 50 and 100 terabytes per image. We’ll get there one day, but no satellite constellation is downlinking that much data just yet. https://toolstud.io/photo/megapixel.php?compare=video&calcul...

The bottom line is that nobody is imaging the entire surface of the Earth at any useful resolution daily (aside from low resolution meteorological satellites, but they can’t find a plane). If you want to track a plane you have to start with other means to point a camera and take an image.

There is a huge difference between a company that has enough satellites in orbit to be able to take an image of any requested area within 20 minutes, and a company that can take an image of all areas on Earth every 20 minutes. MH370 is very unlikely to be captured in an image by coincidence. If there is imagery of it during its last flight then it would be because someone knew in advance that something was going to happen (it seems unlikely that anyone would have known).

[rexreed]

Who would take a picture of the entire earth as a single image at one time?

Take that 500 Trillion Square Meters and divide it up by 1000 satellites (or whatever Starlink plans) and take images sequentially rather than all at once and it becomes rapidly much more manageable.

You don't need a single mult-terapixel image. You just need lots of much smaller images covering more territory on a continuous basis.

if you wanted pictures of the entire earth every 20 minutes, you'd need to figure out how many satellites would give you that coverage, the amount of resolution per image, and the bandwidth requirements transportation of those images in parallel.

Realistically, to get whole-earth coverage every 20 minutes would require a very large constellation of satellites. It's much more reasonable to get some less-than-100% coverage of the earth on a less-than-every-20-minute schedule and scale up from there.

[FractalParadigm]

Theoretically, if Starlink satellites had cameras of that sort of caliber on-board, pointed down with wide enough lenses, they could capture the entire planet continuously and feed that data back down at close to real-time.

[vaguesortof]

In a few years Blacksky should have a capability close to what you're describing