Abstract
CHAFF is a Surrey-designed and built hyperspectral imager prototype intended for the 6U CubeSat platform. Capable of taking hyperspectral images across the wavelength range 460 nm – 820 nm at a best spectral resolution of 3.46 nm (at 546 nm), CHAFF has been designed holistically: consideration of the operational constraints of the CubeSat platform since design inception has allowed the development of techniques which address these constraints within the optical design. For example, CHAFF will employ optically aided image co-registration in order to deal with the physical pointing instability of the CubeSat and co-register the band images on-board the satellite. This will in turn improve the performance of image compression algorithms, which rely on spatial, spectral and statistical redundancy within the hypercube to achieve optimal performance. Additionally, CHAFF has been constructed with commercial off-the-shelf optics, to keep the design commensurate with a university CubeSat budget. Presented here is an update of the progress achieved, focusing on data collected by CHAFF during a field trial undertaken to assess the abilities of the instrument. Performance of the image co-registration and the instrument calibration on natural scene data is assessed, and the behavior of the instrument when presented with vegetation targets is analysed.