Designing a Compressive Sensing Demonstrator of an Earth Observation Payload in the Visible and Medium Infrared: Instrumental Concept and Main Features

Increased spatial resolution and revisit time of payloads operating in the infrared spectral region can offer unprecedented advantages to Earth Observation. This, however, poses several technological challenges, such as large array detector availability and data bandwidth. In this paper, we present a super-resolved demonstrator—based on a compressive sensing architecture—which is being developed to address enhanced performance in terms of at-ground spatial resolution, on-board data processing and encryption functionalities for Earth Observation payloads. The demonstrator’s architecture is here presented, together with its working principle, main features and the approach used for image reconstruction.