VIIRS Day/Night Band (VIIRS DNB)
The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite is a multi-channel scanning radiometer flown on NASA/NOAA polar-orbiting weather satellites. Its Day/Night Band (DNB) channel is sensitive enough to detect faint nighttime sources — moonlit clouds, city lights, fishing fleets, wildfires, and auroras — and is the primary global instrument for nighttime-lights science.
VIIRS DNB currently flies on three platforms:
- suomi-npp (Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership, launched 2011)
- NOAA-20 (launched 2017)
- NOAA-21 (launched 2022)
Spatial resolution is approximately 0.5 km² per pixel; the constellation provides nightly global imaging between roughly 70°N and 60°S, with overpass times around 1:30–4:00 a.m. local.
Within this wiki, VIIRS DNB is the workhorse instrument behind christopher-kyba’s 2014–2022 global nighttime-light-emissions analysis (src-terrestrial-technosignatures-satellites-2026-04) — a study reframed as a terrestrial-technosignature calibration for SETI/exoplanet direct-imaging strategies. A successor mission — esa earth-explorer-13 — is under proposal to detect fainter sources at higher resolution.