The Defense Meteorological Satellite Program(DMSP) is a Department of Defense(DoD) program run by the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center(SMC). The DMSP program designs, builds, launches, and maintains several near polar orbiting, sun synchronous satellites monitoring the meteorological, oceanographic, and solar-terrestrial physics environments.

DMSP satellites are in a near polar orbiting, sun synchronous orbit at an altitude of approximately 830 Km above the earth. Each satellite crosses any point on the earth up to two times a day and has an orbital period of about 101 minutes thus providing nearly complete global coverage of clouds every six hours. 

Each DMSP satellite monitors the atmospheric, oceanographic and solar-geophysical environment of the Earth. The visible and infrared sensors collect images of global cloud distribution across a 3,000 km swath during both daytime and nighttime conditions. The coverage of the microwave imager and sounders are one-half the visible and infrared sensors coverage, thus they cover the polar regions above 60 degrees on a twice daily basis but the equatorial region on a daily basis. The space environmental sensors record along track plasma densities, velocities, composition and drifts.