
South African Space Company Expanding Into Europe
Simera Sense, a space company developing high-resolution optical payloads for smaller satellites, is expanding into Europe to sustain its exponential growth.
Standard cameras, like those in your mobile phone, are optimised to take pictures that represent, as close as possible, what the eye can see. These cameras make use of a colour filter array, known as a Bayer filter mosaic, with a Red, Green, and Blue (RGB) filter distributed on a matrix of photosensors (pixels).
Commercial cameras use a demosaicing algorithm to interpolate the red, green, and blue values for each pixel to recreate the spectral content for each pixel.
These pretty pictures is great to capture the moment but have limited value when going beyond the detection, identification and classification of objects.
Satellites use cameras to gather spatial and spectral data of the earth, identify structures, objects and features within the data. The goal is to recognise, classify and quantify changes. These changes may be of a spatial or spectral nature.
Spectral content is one of the most important parameters when analysing Earth Observation data, as it can provide information beyond what is visible. Multispectral cameras do have the ability to sample the spectral reflectance from an object at multiple wavelengths across a broad spectrum to identify the spectral “footprint” of the object.
The launch of the first Corona Satellite in 1960 started the Earth Observation race. These satellites used black and white film technology to capture images from space and were great for reconnaissance behind closed borders during the Cold War.
The launch of Landsat 1 in 1972 initiated the civilian use of satellite Earth Observation data for scientific and explorations studies. The Multispectral Camera onboard Landsat 1, called the Multispectral Scanner System (MSS), paved the way for other satellites. The four spectral bands used on this satellite, green, red and two Near-IR bands, became the international standard for satellites. These spectral bands also enabled the scientific community to develop multiple vegetation index algorithms to analyse and classify imagery.
Today, Landsat 8 is designed with eleven spectral bands covering the visible, near-IR, Short Wave Infra-red and thermal infrared bands. Most satellite imagers reflect the trend of using multispectral cameras with multiple spectral bands. These satellites include Sentinel-2, the WorldView Satellites, QuickBird and even the Planet Dove range of satellites.
Multispectral cameras with Blue, Green, Red, Red Edge and Near-IR bands are used for multiple applications to provide an overall look at the landscape’s health.
This MultiScape100 CIS brings 7 bands across the visible and near-infrared spectrum to the xScape100 family. This multispectral camera is ideal for a wide range of applications within the vegetation monitoring domain, such as agriculture and forestry. The Figure below shows the relative spectral response of the filter bands. These bands are inline with Sentinel-2 bands two to eight.
Feel free to contact us to discuss your multispectral camera needs.
info@simera-sense.com
Simera Sense, a space company developing high-resolution optical payloads for smaller satellites, is expanding into Europe to sustain its exponential growth.
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