ADEOS was designed to observe Earth's environmental changes, focusing on global warming, depletion of the ozone layer, and deforestation.

The NASA Scatterometer (NSCAT), developed with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), used fan-beam Doppler signals to measure wind speeds over bodies of water.

The Polarization and Directionality of the Earth's Reflectance (POLDER) device was also developed by CNES, and was also launched on ADEOS II.

[3] The AVNIR was a multispectral radiometer for observing the Earth in the visible and near-IR wavelengths at high spatial resolution.

The AVNIR employs a Schmidt optical system and an electronic scanning CCD silicon array.

The AVNIR was able to tilt 40° on either side of the ground track producing a 5.7° field of view and an 60 km (37 mi) swath width.

[5] The IMG instrument was provided by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) of Japan for ADEOS.

The IMG is designed to monitor the horizontal distribution of greenhouse effect gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, etc.)

The NSCAT was a 13.995 GHz (Ku-band) active microwave radar that transmitted continuous pulses to the ocean surface and received backscattered radiation from the Earth.

The rotating mirror was able to tilt 40° forward or backward along the ground track to minimize the effects of Sun glitter from the ocean surface.

OCTS realtime data was transmitted on 465.0 MHz at 20 kbs to local users (e.g. fishing industry).

POLDER was equipped with a wide angle objective taking two dimensional images at various wavelengths in the visible and near-infrared at different polarizations.

The RIS is a 50 cm (20 in) diameter passive corner cube laser retroreflector designed to provide data to infer the distribution of ozone and other trace gases in the atmosphere.

A ground-based laser beam is reflected by the RIS to the ground station and the constituent gases derived from the spectral response.

At each scan position, the Earth radiance was monitored at six wavelengths (0.304, 0.3125, 0.325, 0.3175, 0.3326, and 0.360 microns) to infer the total ozone amount.