Objectives and benefits: design, build, assemble, test and fly a 6U cubesat low earth orbital (LEO) demonstration of hyti (hyperspectral thermal imager) as a pathfinder enabling the next generation of…

The University of Hawaii at Manoa, operating under the University of Hawaii Systems Cashiers Office Division, was awarded a $6.5 million grant by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Shared Services Center to design, build, assemble, test, and fly a 6U CubeSat to demonstrate a hyperspectral thermal imager (HyTI) technology in low Earth orbit. HyTI aims to enable next-generation high spatial, spectral, and temporal resolution thermal infrared imagery acquisition from low Earth orbit to further NASA's Earth observation strategy and support agricultural remote sensing applications including mapping irrigated and rain-fed croplands, determining crop water use, and establishing crop water productivity. The Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology will lead the science and technology aspects while the Hawaii Space Flight Laboratory will manage the program and related work breakdown structure elements with support from subcontractors the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory to provide the focal plane array and Saraniasat Inc. to support science and technology work using onboard processing capabilities.

Objectives and benefits: design, build, assemble, test and fly a 6U cubesat low earth orbital (LEO) demonstration of hyti (hyperspectral thermal imager) as a pathfinder enabling the next generation of high spatial, spectral and temporal resolution thermal infrared (TIR) imagery acquisition from LEO. Monitoring global hydrological cycles and water resources, and developing a detailed understanding of the movement, distribution and availability of water and its variability over time and space is a critical need for NASA s decadal strategy for earth observation from space. An associated need is the measurement of land surface dynamics by monitoring the continuous variability of land surface temperature (LST). While LEO hyperspectral TIR observations will enable detailed measurements of both hydrological and LST variability, the focus will be on enabling agricultural remote sensing. Hyti will be designed to investigate the following food and water security issues: 1. Mapping both irrigated and rainfed cropland areas; 2. Determining crop water use (actual evapotranspiration (ET)) of major world crops 3. Establishing crop water productivity ("crop per drop") of major world crops. Outline of the proposed work: the hawaii institute of geophysics and planetology is the hyti principal investigator and lead for the science/technology WBS element. The hawaii space flight laboratory is responsible for program management, system engineering and efforts in all WBS elements:1 through 11. NASA's jet propulsion laboratory will supply the barrier infrared detector (bird) focal plane array (FPA) under WBS element 5. Saraniasat INC. Will support the science/technology WBS elements. The hyti technologies to be space validated for the first time via LEO flight are: 1. Hyperspectral imager: the hyti hyperspectral imager instrument will be designed and developed by hsfl and higp. Both hsfl and higp have a well-established track record of designing and successfully demonstrating state-of-the-art small satellites and imaging payloads ranging from the visible to the IR, including compact hyperspectral imaging for remote-sensing observations. Based on the fabry-perot interferometer principle, the hyti hyperspectral imager is a unique instrument (TRL 5), and will deliver spatial resolution similar to current landsat-8 performance, but with higher spectral resolution. In a 430 KM orbit, the hyti instrument will have ground resolution of 60M for up to 50 spectral samples in the 8.0-10.7 micron range, with a peak SNR of ~500:1. Higp has successfully demonstrated the proposed no moving parts hyperspectral imager for a wide range of DOD programs, as well as for a NASA IIP. 2. TIR imager focal plane: the heart of the hyti hyperspectral imager is a 2 dimensional, bird FPA designed and developed at JPL. Bird imagers have high uniformity, low cost, low noise and higher operating temperatures than previously-flown TIR fpas. JPL will supply the 2D FPA within an integrated dewar cooler assembly to hsfl. 3. High-performance onboard computing: onboard computing has been the holy grail of scientific, remote-sensing missions. The high volume of raw hyperspectral imagery justifies the implementation of OBC. Saraniasat INC. Has developed fast, low computational footprint algorithms for weak-signal detection, sensor fusion and orthorectification which, when operating on the advanced unibap E2160 heterogeneous OBC platform, promise to achieve fast turnaround (within 24 HRS of acquisition) of the processed data and products. Period of performance: construction of the flight model: 24 months; hyti flight demonstration: 1 month nominal mission. Extended mission after 1 month; total project period of performance: 36 months.