Calibration of Chaff: Cubesat Hyperspectral Application for Farming

CubeSats are currently gaining significant traction in Earth Observation, with increasingly advanced instrumentation such as hyperspectral imaging. However, the challenges of bringing such instrumentation to CubeSats are great; the platform suffers from severe physical, operational and budgetary constraints. Adopting a holistic design methodology may hold the key to allowing science-grade Earth Observation to be achieved from a CubeSat. Presented here is CHAFF (CubeSat Hyperspectral Application For Farming), a low-cost hyperspectral imager prototype, capable of taking 1024 spectral bands between 460 nm - 820 nm. CHAFF has been constructed using commercial off-the-shelf optics, in order to produce a design commensurate with the typical resources of a university CubeSat mission. CHAFF has been calibrated at the National Physical Laboratory, in order to assess the performance of the COTS optics. An impressive spectral resolution of 3.46 nm at 546 nm has been achieved, and 74.95% of CHAFF's pixels exhibit a linearity deviation of < 2%.