SISSI Project: A Feasibility Study for a Super Resolved Compressive Sensing Multispectral Imager in the Medium Infrared

This paper describes the activities related to a feasibility study for an Earth observation optical payload, operating in the medium infrared, based on super-resolution and compressive sensing techniques. The presented activities are running in the framework of the ASI project SISSI, aiming to improve ground spatial resolution and mitigate saturation/blooming effects. The core of the payload is a spatial light modulator (SLM): a bidimensional array of micromirrors electronically actuated. Thanks to compressive sensing approach, the proposed payload eliminates the compression board, saving mass, memory and energy consumption.

Subsurface Thermal Modeling of Oxia Planum, Landing Site of ExoMars 2022

Numerical simulations are required to thermophysically characterize Oxia Planum, the landing site of the mission ExoMars 2022. A drilling system is installed on the ExoMars rover, and it will be able to analyze down to 2 meters in the subsurface of Mars. The spectrometer Ma_MISS (Mars Multispectral Imager for Subsurface, Coradini and Da Pieve, 2001) will investigate the lateral wall of the borehole generated by the drill, providing hyperspectral images. It is not fully clear if water ice can be found in the subsurface at Oxia Planum. However, Ma_MISS has the capability to characterize and map the presence of possible ices, in particular water ice. We performed simulations of the subsurface temperatures by varying the thermal inertia, and we quantified the effects of self-heating. Moreover, we quantified the heat released by the drilling operations, by exploring different frictional coefficients and angular drill velocities, in order to evaluate the lifetime of possible water ice.

TOTAL SUSPENDED SOLID DISTRIBUTION IN HAU RIVER USING SENTINEL 2A SATELLITE IMAGERY

This research was applied high-resolution Sentinel-2A imagery which aims to monitor a suitability of MultiSpectral Imager (MSI) at higher resolution (10 m) for mapping of Total Suspended Solids (TSS) ) in the upper reaches of the Mekong Delta – An Giang province. The field survey is carried out to collect TSS at random distribution sites outside full-dyke protection. A remote sensing algorithm with a regression function method is developed to estimate TSS concentration automatically to select between the most sensitive TSS and water reflectance relationship. The regression analytical algorithm is predicted the output values based on normalized suspended material index (NSMI) (r2 = 0.92), showing the MSI sensor’s great potential to estimate TSS. The results confirm that suspended materials in the surface water reached the minimum of 10.36 mg/l and the maximum of 328.56 mg/l in An Giang province, the suspended materials distributional tendency with high content was mainly in flooded fields near the upstream of the basin of Hau river, especially in areas without the dike enclosure and the content was low in the areas within the dike enclosure. These findings promote further research in water quality studies relying on both operational Sentinel-2A and Sentinel-2B imageries with great implications to improve the understanding of turbid coastal and inland water environments.