By the end of the decade a revolutionary new micro-satellite will orbit around the world at an altitude of 700km sending precise information on agriculture and marine changes in unprecedented precision and detail. The Israeli-French project will allow farmers to better treat their crops, fisherman to locate large quantities of fish in mid-sea and will also vastly increase the ability of the scientific community to study and monitor the flora and fauna in a number of areas around the globe. Equipped with an advanced plasma engine, VENUS will be able to operate for at least 4-5 years in its planed orbit.

Modern satellites have a number of applications. Beside the obvious military uses satellites today are used for communication, navigation, space research, weather prediction and earth observation. This last type of satellites has a number of important functions. They conduct environmental monitoring, help create and improve maps and play an important role in the development of agriculture and fishing.

The heart of most observation satellites consists of a camera. Early satellites carried panchromatic cameras capable of taking pictures in only one spectral "band". Pictures originated from a panchromatic camera are commonly displayed in grey scale, where the brightness of a particular pixel is proportional to the intensity of solar radiation reflected by the target. Even today a number of reconnaissance satellites still use panchromatic cameras which are considered to have the highest resolution of any space-based camera type. A more recent development is the multi-spectral camera which can create color pictures that consist of many image layers; each layer represents an image acquired at a particular wavelength band. For example, the French SPOT 5 sensor operating in the multi-spectral mode detects radiations in four wavelength bands: the green (500-590 nm), red (610-680 nm), near infrared (790-890 nm) and the short-wave infrared or SWIR (1580-1750 nm).

In order to improve the capabilities of space-based cameras even further, super-spectral cameras with 10 bands or more were developed in recent years capable of receiving and analyzing a wider range of information. For instance, using a super-spectral camera it is possible to examine whether trees in a specific part of a forest are dry, or whether a portion of the sea contains a large amount of chlorophyll. There are currently only a handful of super-spectral cameras in orbit around the world and the one planed for the new VENUS project is going to have some unique features that have been explained to IsraCast by Eytan Reis, Director of Marketing & Business Development for the space program in the Israeli company EL-OP which developed the VENUS's camera. Besides its relatively high resolution - 5.3m across all of its 12 bands - it was specifically fine-tuned for its purpose of analyzing agriculture and water quality. The direction the industry is taking these days is to expand the number of bands, and there are already a few hyper-spectral cameras in orbit capable of analyzing hundreds of bands at a time. EL-OP is also working in this direction, said Reis, but today most hyper-spectral cameras are still complicated, expensive and have fairly low resolution. The super-spectral camera selected for VENUS is therefore the perfect choice for the project, giving high resolution on one hand and a wide range of specially selected bands on the other.



Posted by: John    Source