Title: Pathway to Future Sustainable Land Imaging: The Compact Hyperspectral Prism Spectrometer
Presenting Author: Thomas U. Kampe
Organization: Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp.
Co-Author(s): William Good

Abstract:
The SLI program aims to advance technologies for the Landsat-like measurements for at least the next two decades. To improve on current land imaging capabilities, SLI aims to develop a new generation of smaller, more capable, and less costly instruments that can meet or exceed current imaging capabilities. Landsat satellites, associated ground processing, distribution, and data archiving systems have provided the world-wide user community with multispectral measurements of land and coastal regions for over 40 years, informs a broad range of applications, including land use change, forest health, carbon inventories, and monitoring the Earth’s environment, climate, and natural resources. In the prioritized list of Earth observations was published in the 2014 National Plan for Civil Earth Observations, observations from the Landsat program ranked #3, just behind satellite-based GPS and ground-based Next Generation Weather Radars (NEXRAD). While continuing the Landsat mission is a priority, mission implementation needs to be revisited. There is a need to balance competing stakeholder desires for data continuity, new science, and data archive and accessibility within the current context of emerging sensor, platform, launch vehicle, and computational technologies, emerging commercial space players, possible international agreements for data sharing, and realistic levels of funding. Updating the Landsat mission to meet stakeholder expectations in a sustainable way is challenging but the work is underway and the future program is called Sustainable Land Imaging (SLI). CHPS (Compact Hyperspectral Prism Spectrometer) is a new instrument concept developed by Ball Aerospace specifically for the SLI program. CHPS’ innovative VSWIR prism spectrometer design avoids the straylight shortcomings of grating imaging spectrometers and accommodates full aperture, full optical path calibration to ensure the high radiometric accuracy required to meet the SLI measurement objectives. As part of the CHPS effort, an aircraft demonstration instrument will be built and integrated into an aircraft. Hyperspectral data will be acquired over a range of land surface types, including vegetated and forested, regions, and water bodies. An overflight of a uniform calibration site timed to coincide with an OLI overpass. Data acquired from these flight campaigns will be made available to the science community to evaluate the applicability of hyperspectral data to the SLI mission and broader earth science applications. The CHPS project plan and current status are presented.