I’m always looking for better ways of explaining what I do to people who don’t have technical backgrounds.  The video below provides a nice overview of remote sensing as a field and notes some environmental applications that researchers are addressing as well as the challenges they face as satellite-based Earth-observing sensors age past their design lifetime.  (I don’t work environmental problems but set that aside for the time being.  The methods available and approaches to information gathering that I use are essentially the same.)