The aerostat is a new airborne remote sensing platform, which is suitable for high resolution remote sensing in a small and medium area. The floating aircraft, especially the medium and low altitude small remote control airship, can be supported by the power propulsion and control system to implement the maneuvering flight. It has the characteristics of long flight time, large coverage area, strong load capacity, and high cost-efficiency. Satellite remote sensing data that lacks high spatial resolution and timeliness is of limited ability to access remote environment at a micro scale. Rotary or fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platforms, which is capable of performing unmanned inspection, surveillance, reconnaissance, and mapping of inimical areas with amateur or SLR digital cameras, can fly with manual, semi-automated, and autonomous modes. It is well known that recently UAVs in the geomatics field became a common platform for data acquisition, but the platforms have a low payload capacity and its flight was too short to be a valid complementary solution to data acquisitions. Compared with several other aviation platforms, the airship platform has a comprehensive advantage, which meets the comprehensive urgent needs and precision large scale mapping requirement for the areas with complex terrains. It has a wide application prospect in various fields, such as basic geographic data collection, land resources exploration, environmental monitoring, and agricultural vegetation monitoring. As its height superiority,the airship can effectively overcome the influence of earth curvature and the environment which helps to enhance the detection performance. Near space aircraft is the fundamental infrastructure platform in breaking down the natural barriers between the aviation region and the outer space. The stratosphere airship, which is one of the quasi-static aircrafts within the near space, has unique platform advantages. It is equipped with laser scanner, VIS camera (one for vertical capturing or more for slope capturing), thermo camera, and INS/GPS as an exterior orientation (pose) determination in undertaking tasks of aviation thermometric mapping and environmental studies. This objectives of this paper are (1) to analyze the application cases of the remote sensing telemetry of China's human aircraft, UAV, middle and low altitude airship and stratospheric airship platform; (2) to analyze the performance characteristics, working methods, and technical difficulties of each aviation platform; (3) to compare the technical features of various platforms; (4) to discusse the advantages of the application of the small and medium remote control airship platform in remote sensing telemetry, and (5) to explore the development status and key technology of the stratospheric airship. In the end, the future application of the remote aerostat is prospected in the light of the research progress in the international related fields.
