An animation showing the coverage of the DB downlink for both AQUA and TERRA - this is a clip for the EOSDB movie that will be used with the voiceover segment: "it takes four overpasses a day, two in the day and two at night. One from each of the satellites. One from terra and one from aqua"
I set up a simple Satellite Toolkit (STK) scenario with TERRA and AQUA two line elements around from early October 2003. I defined the DB receiving stations such that they acquired coverage when the satellites were 5 degrees above the horizon. The images that could be created with the basic version of STK had a few characteristics made them unsuitable for our movie, so I decided to use MAYA instead and set up a scene with accurate TERRA and AQUA orbits and an earth that showed which areas were day and which were night. The TERRA and AQUA orbits were animated with a series of nulls that set the inclination and orbital period, true anomaly was adjusted to match the satellites to the positions in the STK scenario for October 10, 2003 1200 UTC.
An example still from the first draft of the clip shows the earth with the terminator running through the middle of the US. The daytime earth is displayed with a MODIS rgb texture, while the nighttime earth has a bluish land/ocean texture overlaid with the DMSP OLS stable lights dataset. DB ground receiving stations are shown as yellow dots, while the areas of the earth within range of the AQUA and TERRA db downlink are shown as semi-transparent white disks. The one DB receiving station that has TERRA in view is the Canary Islands site; it is show as a red dot within the white disk of the TERRA downlink area.