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These and other initiatives demonstrate the commitment of nations around the world to the study of Earth as a system and to the investigation of global change. The ISY offers the space agencies of the world the opportunity to highlight the key role of space in understanding the Earth.

As part of these international efforts, the United States is planning for a comprehensive approach to observing the full spectrum of processes which make up the Earth system through observations from space. This approach requires enlarged concentrations of orbiting remote sensing instrumentation and mission lifetimes of a decade or more. 

The main thrust of this approach the Earth Observing System, or EOS. Current plans call for its initiation in the early 1990s. EOS will use highly capable space platforms in polar orbit. Each of the platforms is designed to accommodate numbers of instruments for simultaneous observation of global variables. The mission eventually should involve at least four polar platforms in both morning and afternoon crossing time orbits. 

The first two polar platforms will be part of the Space Station infrastructure, and can be supplemented by instruments on the Space Station to observe specific phenomena. The fact that we will be able to put specific scientific instruments on the Space Station will be one of the key scientific benefits of the Station, and one we expect will have a broad impact on scientific research through the end of the 1990s and well beyond.