New technologies for intelligent high-resolution sensing from small satellite platforms: crewsr and video

There are current critical needs of NASA, NOAA, and other agencies carrying out Earth environmental monitoring for higher-performance observing systems (lower noise, finer resolution, broader coverage, etc.) but also smaller, lower-cost sensing platforms that offer flexibility in how they are deployed and used. To achieve these ambitions, it is necessary to consider the observing system, comprising not only the sensor, but also the concept of operations, processing, and potential for collaborative and synergistic observations. Here we present a new approach that enables dynamic, data-driven sensing and provides a way to test and evaluate the overall end-to-end system performance in the laboratory prior to launch with realistic Earth scenes. Recent technology advances now enable the utilization of new sensing concepts that reconfigure the sensor in real time to adjust where they are looking, their dwell time, their spatial resolution, and depending on the platform, their geometrical vantage point. For example, at frequencies spanning approximately 10-100 GHz, phased array and reflectarray observations of wind ( speed and direction), wide-swath polarimetric imagery, soil moisture and sea surface temperature, and atmospheric thermodynamic state that are deemed critical by NASA's strategic planning are now possible. These measurements would all be improved by this work, since the sensor would be configured for maximum resolution, coverage, and dwell time for regions in the scene that exhibit the highest variability and would thus benefit the most from high-fidelity sensing. This approach also efficiently optimizes use of a fixed set of resources.