Comment by wongarsu

Around the poles is a bit of a blind spot in satellite coverage. The angle with which the satellite orbit is offset from an equatorial orbit is called the orbital inclination. Because the earth rotates under the satellite, a 0° orbit would give you perfect coverage of the equator and not much more, a 10° orbit would give you good coverage of a band around the equator, etc. The closer to 90°, the more coverage you get of the northern and southern latitudes.

Now there's a neat trick you can pull where you go into a special 98° orbit (so like a 82° orbit, but in the other direction). At that point the slight bulge of the earth twists your orbit around just so that for any given point on earth you always pass over it at the same time of day, giving you identical shadows. That's called a sun-synchronous orbit, and is obviously immensely helpful for optical observations. But those missing 8 degrees prevent you from observing extreme latitudes. Usually we don't care because not much is happening there anyways

Even satellites without optical instruments usually suffer from the same blindspot. For example if you look at the Starlink constellation almost all satellites only reach up to about the middle of Great Britain. Everything further North is only served by a much smaller number of high inclination satellites. And there don't seem to be any Starlink satellites going directly over the poles