Teledyne Brown Engineering has partnered with the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) to host the International Space Station’s (ISS) first commercial hyperspectral sensor. The DESIS-30 (DLR Earth Sensing Imaging Spectrometer) is scheduled to be hosted aboard Teledyne’s ISS-based Multi User System for Earth Sensing (MUSES) platform in June of 2018. The DESIS-30 is an Offner spectrometer with a spectral range of 400 to 1000 nm (VIS-NIR). With 2.55nm sampling and 235 spectral channels, it will be the highest-fidelity hyperspectral sensor in operation. DLR will use the acquired hyperspectral imagery for scientific investigations while Teledyne will make it available for commercial applications.
Teledyne’s MUSES platform was launched to the ISS in June of 2017 and achieved full operating capability in September of the same year. The platform was developed as part of a cooperative agreement with NASA to create opportunities for both Government and commercial applications such as imaging, technology demonstration and space qualification payloads supporting research, scientific studies and humanitarian efforts. Once DESIS-30 is in place, the platform will have remaining capacity for three additional payloads to support other imagers, technology demonstrations and space qualification missions.
“The differentiator of the MUSES platform is that by leveraging the ISS infrastructure; time to orbit is significantly reduced, mission length is adjusted to meet the needs of the customer, and the payload can be returned to earth for analysis or reuse.”, stated Jack Ickes, Senior Vice President of Geospatial Solutions at Teledyne Brown Engineering. “We are providing companies and researchers a path to low-earth orbit where their hardware can be deployed and returned for a fraction of the cost and effort otherwise incurred by satellite deployment.”
The MUSES pointing capability of 5o/45o cross track and +/- 25o along track significantly improves the revisit time of the DESIS-30 imager over the baseline ISS Orbit. Teledyne’s Amazon-Cloud based Data Management System will process and make acquired imagery available within hours. This high degree of agility and processing speed makes it possible to provide information for disaster response in near real time.
DLR and Teledyne want to leverage the data from DESIS and future MUSES instruments to further improve Earth observation and to expand the use of hyperspectral sensing in commercial applications. The ISS circles the earth 16 times per day, giving the platform and its instruments frequent and broad coverage of its surfaces. Once operational, images from DESIS-30 will be available for access via Amazon Cloud for research purposes around the globe.