Brenda Marie Rivers
NASA has partnered with Raytheon Technologies to develop a land-imaging system designed to expand the visual capacity of traditional space-based telescopes for applications such as environmental monitoring and natural-resource allocation.
Raytheon said Tuesday its intelligence and space business secured a grant from NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office to build the Advanced Technology Land Imaging Spectroradiometer as part of the NASA/U.S. Geological Survey Landsat program.
ATLIS features a compact architecture and digital focal plane arrays that work to “correct†visual distortions that affect image quality.
The light-measurement technology has a capacity to process 14 colors that can support research into water quality, vegetation health and aerosol presence in the atmosphere, according to Raytheon.
NASA and USGS intend to send the ATLIS demonstrator to orbit for the Landsat 10 mission after the launch Landsat 9 in mid-2021. Both agencies aim to establish a system of operational land-imaging satellites integrated with ATLIS by the late 2020s.
