CSIMBA: CONTRIBUTING TO GLOBAL MONITORING WITH A SMALL HYPERSPECTRAL MISSION

Stefan Livensa, Bavo Delauréa, Joris Blommaerta and Bart Paijmansa

a
Flemish Institute for Technological Research, Center for Remote Sensing and Earth Observation Processes (VITO-TAP),
Mol 2400, Belgium

Earth observation from space is evolving towards more detailed monitoring with greater cost efficiency. This is realized by
using smaller platforms and constellations. For the VISNIR range, the main missions are using multispectral observations,
with optimized choices of spectral bands to ensure usability for a wide range of applications. Additionally, there is
considerable interest to use more detailed spectral information in application studies, with some new and upcoming
missions (e.g. DESIS, PRISMA, EnMAP) raising both quality and availability of data [1].

Hyperspectral observations offers most benefits at fine spatial resolutions, when excessive signal mixing is avoided.
However many phenomena under study are dynamic and require short revisit times. To overcome the coverage and temporal
resolution limits of a single mission, constellations can be used. To optimize the available imaging and downlink capacity,
it is advantageous to record only information not yet available through other missions, and create additional value through
observations refining the spatial, spectral or temporal resolution. Some recent studies have shown good results combining
data from missions with very different characteristics [2]. HYBRIS, a study for a hyperspectral Cubesat mission, identified
inter-calibration and exploitation of synergies with Sentinels optical instruments as its main focus [3].

Using a similar philosophy, we are developing a proto-flight model hyperspectral instrument called CSIMBA [4]. The
instrument will be fitted into a 12 U CubeSat platform for the CSIMBA in orbit demonstration mission, targeted for 2021,
which will capture hyperspectral images with 20m GSD and 80km swath from 500km altitude. It uses a 12 Mpx CMOS
sensor on which Fabry Perot interference filters are deposited using pixel-precise direct deposition. With filters arranged in
different thickness along sensor lines, the sensor captures frame images with more than 150 different spectral bands (12
lines per band) in the spectral range 475nm-900nm. Full hyperspectral information of an area is collected during scanning.

The overall objective of the CSIMBA mission is to demonstrate the performance of the instrument, the achievable data
quality and suitability for various remote sensing applications. The system will be equipped with powerful read out
electronics and on board computing capabilities to support advanced acquisition and processing schemes. The high frame
rates allow to apply digital time delay integration (TDI) imaging to increase SNR and high dynamic range (HDR) to
increase dynamic range. Two high sensitive panchromatic sensor zones allow to image the scenes in detail and under
different angles, complementing the hyperspectral imaging. By using different acquisition modes (full hyperspectral or
selected spectral bands, combination with panchromatic) we will explore synergies between the acquired information.

Only a minimal pre-flight calibration campaign is foreseen, so it will be challenging to achieve well-calibrated products
using vicarious radiometric and geometric calibration. The geolocation budget shows that direct georeferencing is not
sufficiently accurate and image based corrections will be needed to achieve accurate coregistration. To optimize the use of
the available downlink capacity, on-board data reduction methods will be implemented, including area cropping, exclusion
of clouded areas, binning, spectral band reduction etc. On ground, the acquired data will not only be used to generate
standard earth observation products, but also synergies with freely available earth observation data will be exploited, and
fusion product created to obtain finer spatial, spectral or temporal resolution. Application studies will be performed on the
resulting data set, which demonstrate the added value which can be achieved with a “smart” small hyperspectral mission.

REFERENCES
[1] M. Rast1 and T. Painter, Earth Observation Imaging Spectroscopy for Terrestrial Systems: An Overview of Its History,
Techniques, and Applications of Its Missions, Surveys in Geophysics 40:303–331, 2019
[2] B. Aragon et al, CubeSats Enable High Spatiotemporal Retrievals of Crop-Water Use for Precision Agriculture, Remote
Sens. 10(12), 1867, 2018
[3] A. Piro et al, HYBRIS: Analysis and Design of a Hyper-Spectral CubeSat Mission for Multiple Remote Sensing
Applications and Earth Observation Synergies, Proc 4S symposium, Sorrento, Italy, 2018
[4] J. Blommaert et al: CSIMBA: Towards a Smart-spectral Cubesat Constellation, Proc IGARRS, Yokohama, Japan, 2019