Several days separate the consecutive overflights of a fixed geographical point by a geodesic satellite along the same track so that the semi-diurnal and diurnal oceanic tides as measured by an on-board altimeter will appear as low frequency oscillations of the ocean surface. This was an argument against the sun-synchronous satellite altimeters for the study of (luni-) solar tides, these constituents being rejected under the 2 cy/year frequency or even in the steady sea surface. However, this simplified scheme should be drastically modified by the adjunction of supplementary informations supplied by other data (e.g. from tide gauges), hydrodynamical models or statistics. Here we only show that using the a priori spatial statistical properties of the tides in a total inversion of altimeter data, the sun-synchronous satellites may contribute to map the (luni-) solar tides. In particular the accuracy of a tidal inverse solution is little dependent on its apparent frequency and on the proximity of the other aliased tides. ¿ American Geophysical Union 1989