Onboard CubeSat data processing for hyperspectral detection of chemical plumes

We describe the development and implementation of plume detection algorithms under severe bandwidth and processing constraints imposed by a CubeSat architecture. In particular, two ideas will be presented: one employs onboard processing to reduce the data that is downlinked, and one employs the Sparse Matrix Transform (SMT) to speed up the onboard computation of an approximate Mahalanobis distance.