A team of investigators describes a new imaging spectrometer design that could enable improved pictures from NASA’s Landsat, for better understanding of phenomena, and environments as various as coral reefs, urbanization, tropical deforestation, and glaciers.

A retractable boom (4 m long) with 2 powered joints helps the articulated HGA (Excessive Achieve Antenna) which downlinks data by way of TDRS (Tracking and Data Relay System). The RF communications system uses S-, X-, L-, and Ku-bands. The S/C is three-axis stabilized, zero momentum with management to 0.01º utilizing reaction wheels.

Landsat pictures aren’t terribly big or difficult to process by today’s computing requirements. In a GeoTIFF image format, the file for a single 30m band is approximately 53MB. So long as you might be dealing with a study space that is contained within one or a couple of Landsat scenes, you should not need any special computer hardware to have the ability … Read the rest