Sun-synchronous satellites are known to pass over any given point of the planet's surface at the same local mean solar time (link-to-wiki). Landsat is one of these sun-synchronous satellites.
I'm currently considering a dataset which contains a list with image-acquisition timestamps of Landsat imagery. However, I note that there is a some variance (within the order of minutes) in the moments of when the image was taken.
This is a sample of that list:
[datetime.datetime(1999, 5, 2, 1, 33, 58, tzinfo=<UTC>),
datetime.datetime(1999, 5, 18, 1, 33, 42, tzinfo=<UTC>),
datetime.datetime(1999, 6, 3, 1, 33, 22, tzinfo=<UTC>),
datetime.datetime(1999, 6, 19, 1, 33, 13, tzinfo=<UTC>),
datetime.datetime(1999, 7, 5, 1, 33, 5, tzinfo=<UTC>),
datetime.datetime(1999, 7, 6, 1, 42, 16, tzinfo=<UTC>),
datetime.datetime(1999, 7, 13, 1, 48, 5, tzinfo=<UTC>),
datetime.datetime(1999, 7, 14, 1, 27, 13, tzinfo=<UTC>),
datetime.datetime(1999, 7, 21, 1, 33, 1, tzinfo=<UTC>),
datetime.datetime(1999, 7, 22, 1, 42, 17, tzinfo=<UTC>)
What causes this variance?
Note, shouldn't be relevant, but the images are obtained through Google Earth Engine.