On-board hyperspectral compression and analysis system for the NEMO satellite

The primary mission of the Naval EarthMap Observer (NEMO) is to demonstrate the importance of hyperspectral imagery in characterizing the littoral battlespace environment and littoral model development. NEMO will demonstrate real time on-board processing and compression of hyperspectral data with real-time tactical downlink of ocean and surveillance products directly from the spacecraft to the field. The NRL's Optical Real-time Adaptive Spectral Identification System (ORASIS) will be deployed on a 3.8 Gflop multiprocessing computer, the Imagery On-Board Processor (IOBP), for automated data analysis, feature extraction and compression. NEMO's wide area coverage (10(6) km(2) imaged per day), as well as power and cost constraints require data compression between 10:1 and 20:1. The NEMO Sensor Imaging Payload (SIP) consists of two primary sensors: first, the Coastal Ocean Imaging Spectrograph (COIS) is a hyperspectral imager which records 60 spectral bands in the VNIR (400 to 1000 nm) and 150 bands in the SWIR (1000 to 2500 nm), with a GSD of either 30 or 60 meters; and second, the 5 m GSD Panchromatic Imaging Camera (PIC). This paper describes the design and implementation of the data processing hardware and software for the NEMO satellite.