NANOimager

The NANOimager is a miniaturized optical payload applicable to nanosatellites. It consists of an imaging unit based on an enhanced InGaAs sensor sensitive in shortwave infrared region with a linear variable optical filter to achieve multispectral behavior. The optics parts consist of modified COTS refractive optics with multiple lenses optimized to NIR/SWIR wavelengths. The focal length of 100 mm and big aperture enable modest resolution (100 m at 500 km in NIR/SWIR) appropriate for sensing vegetative and environmental processes on Earth, and SNR above 100 on each channel. Up to 20 non-overlapping bands covering wavelength region from 900 nm to 1700 nm and with resolution from 20 to 40 nm can be selected. SWIR spectral channels extend the usable areas of different applications that can be covered by remote sensing such as: materials identification, wildfire response, environmental pollution observation, mining/geology, and also has a big influence in the area of vegetation and agriculture (food security, drought stress, etc…).

The NANOimager is designed as System-on-a-Chip (SoC) architecture with a PicoSkyFT soft-core processor, which incorporates several mitigation techniques to increase imager availability and reliability.