AITC News
Published in the RSAA Lunations
Vol1 Issue22 1–30 November 2021
In these tumultuous times, it’s clear to most of us that a little bit of diversification and community/industry engagement is a solid investment for the future. Surprisingly, the market for complex high-performance astronomical instruments is small and rather volatile, hence for some time now we have been exploring parallel opportunities with potential for technology transfer and opportunities to use additional clichés and jargon. Space based astronomy instrumentation offers some powerful science returns but is a long and expensive road to travel and has limited community support. Conversely the Australian Remote Sensing community is an international powerhouse that is highly regarded for its history of innovative usage of freely available data from missions such as the US LandSat program and more recently the excellent Sentinal-2 mission, through the European Copernicus program. It does however have limited direct instrumental experience.
With the advent of the Australian Space Agency, and the formation of the ANU Institute for Space (InSpace) we’ve been delivering on a number of programs that have seen the technical team providing conceptual studies for Earth Observation “sensors” (by which we mean telescope, filters/prisms/gratings, detectors and operating/cooling systems all rolled into one – more on that from Jamie next month I believe). Many of you will have heard me talk about the CHICO project previously. CHICO is envisaged as a small sensor for coastal water quality monitoring. Careful analysis of the littoral and riparian zones, the interface between the land and the sea, or land and an inland waterway (loads of great new words for dyslexic me to learn to misspell professionally) is critical for a host of nationally important applications in agricultural, aquaculture and general land management. The CHICO program was funded under the Defence Materials Technology Center (DMTC) HASS program (great logo courtesy of Henry Zovaro, I’m sure it is why we got the funding initially), in partnership with CSIRO and Canberra based space service company Skykraft. The first phase of the CHICO program was complete in September this year, leading to a series of detailed design documents and a 1:1 scale engineering model (see Figure 1) which is getting excellent mileage with stakeholders, politicians and my farther in the UK (who still wants to know when I’ll get a proper job). We’re actively negotiating for Phase-2 of the program – to fabricate and test a working flight model – in an ongoing partnership with CSIRO, DST and the ARC SmartSat CRC. Fingers crossed for more news there soon.
In parallel to CHICO, but at longer wavelengths, we have also been seeking to deploy the “noise free near-infrared” detectors I constantly bang on about. We have a few of these SAPHIRA eAPD detectors in the electronics lab now - having successfully demonstrated the technology at the ANU 2.3m telescope a few years ago. We need these ground-breaking devices for wavefront sensing in astronomy, but they offer interesting opportunities for Poisson limited astronomical spectroscopy (more on that next time) and, in my view, Remote Sensing. Even before the devastating bushfires of 2019/20 our team was working with A./Prof. Marta Yebra (at the Fener School) to develop a sensor system to provide high ground resolution imaging that is critically tuned to tracking fuel load and moisture content in the Australia bush. It turns out that most previous efforts focused on either pine or European deciduous forests (northern hemisphere biased missions) whereas the Eucalyptus based bush systems in Australia (and as it happens southern California) need critically different pass-bands in what we think of as the J/H/K windows.
We are working closely with Marta and the wider ANU InSpace team (superbly guided by InSpace Business Development manager Dr Jia-Urnn Lee) to secure funding to develop our OzFuel mission concept. We recently released a Pre-Phase A design study (part funded by Geoscience Australia) defining the problem and our route to solution. And I think I’m now aloud to say we’ve secured funding to deliver the Phase-A design study early in the new year. You can find out more at the links below:
https://inspace.anu.edu.au/activity/missions/ozfuel
https://inspace.anu.edu.au/files/ANU%20OzFuel%20Pre-Phase%20A_Aug%202021.pdf
So, lots going on in low Earth Orbit (LEO), and that’s even before we start talking about all the Laser coms developments that will be essential to getting all the data back down to the ground for analysis, or the AI systems that generate near-realtime value added data products. So, come and have a chat with the team (via zoom still I guess) if you’d like to know more about our many and nefarious ambitions in this area, or if you think you’ve got an observational or analysis idea that would make us all rich and famous.
Rob Sharp
Figure 1: The engineering model for the CHICO hyperspectral (i.e., integral-field spectrograph) sensor model for monitoring costal water quality
