Ball Aerospace completes airborne flights of two Nasa SLI instruments

Ball Aerospace has completed airborne science flights of two compact instruments built for Nasa’s Sustained Land Imaging (SLI) Technology development programme.

The SLI instruments are the Reduced Envelope Multispectral Imager – Airborne (REMI-AB) and the Compact Hyperspectral Prism Spectrometer – Airborne (CHPS-AB).

They have been developed to show enhanced mission performance and enable flexible architecture for the Landsat programme.

The REMI-AB and CHPS-AB instruments are the result of around four years of development, testing and airborne science flights.

Jointly managed by Nasa and the USGS, the Landsat programme is a series of Earth-observing satellite missions.

Ball Aerospace civil space vice-president and general manager Dr Makenzie Lystrup said: “Working closely with the land imaging community, we successfully demonstrated the capabilities of the compact REMI-AB and CHPS-AB instruments.

“In our commitment to science at any scale, we continue to innovate new ways to deliver high performing technology in increasingly compact packages.”

Ball’s two instruments have been designed to meet Nasa’s SLI-T programme’s aim to develop technology for small and affordable payloads that meet Landsat imaging capabilities.

The spaceborne CHPS would yield visible via shortwave infrared data and spaceborne REMI would deliver visible through thermal data.

In June, Nasa awarded the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Space Weather contract to spacecraft components manufacturer Ball Aerospace for the Space Weather Follow On-Lagrange 1 (SWFO-L1) spacecraft.