ISRO to develop full-fledged Hyperspectral Imaging Earth observation satellite

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in August 2017 announced that it will soon launch a full-fledged niche Earth Observation (EO) satellite using a critical chip that it has developed.

The chip is technically called an “optical imaging detector array.” The EO satellite will be called the Hyperspectral Imaging Satellite (HySIS).

However, the ISRO also announced that no specific time-frame is yet decided for the launch.

Key highlights

• As per the ISRO, the Hyperspectral Imaging Satellite can see in 55 spectral or colour bands from 630 kilometres above ground.

• Hyperspectral imaging is said to be an EO trend that is being experimented globally. Adding a new dimension to plain-vanilla optical imagers, it can be used for a range of activities from monitoring the environment, crops, looking for oil and minerals all the way up to military surveillance.

What is hyperspectral imaging?

• Hyperspectral imaging collects and processes information from across the electromagnetic spectrum.

• The goal of hyperspectral imaging is to obtain the spectrum for each pixel in the image of a scene, with the purpose of finding objects, identifying materials or detecting processes.

• There are two general branches of spectral imagers. There are push broom scanners and the related whisk broom scanners, which read images over time, and snapshot hyperspectral imaging, which uses a staring array to generate an image in an instance.

• Whereas the human eye sees colour of visible light in mostly three bands (red, green, and blue), spectral imaging divides the spectrum into many more bands.

• In hyperspectral imaging, the recorded spectra have fine wavelength resolution and cover a wide range of wavelengths.

Source- The Hindu