With the launch of the ZACube-2 nanosatellite, a new technique of wildfire detection and monitoring from space will be evaluated. Potassium is an essential plant macronutrient and all vegetation biomass fires exhibit characteristic spectral ¿K-line¿ emissions in the near infrared (NIR), which can be isolated and observed with suitable optical filtering. However, as a new technique, the effectiveness of this kind of sensor from a space platform is unknown. The magnitude of the K-line emission signal seen from space is contingent on many factors, including the concentration of potassium in the biomass fuel, fire size and intensity as well as atmospheric state. The architecture and preparation of the flight model K-line sensor hardware is described, together with the approach to verification and validation of the sensor characteristics and performance on-orbit.
Reference:
Cogan, D., Griffith, D.J., Magidimisha, E. and Van Zyl, R. 2018. Flight hardware verification and validation of the K-line fire sensor payload on ZACube-2. In: Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Sensors, MEMS and Electro-Optical Systems (SMEOS) Skukuza, South Africa, 8-10 October 2018
Cogan, D., Griffith, D. J., Magidimisha, E., & Van Zyl, R. (2018). Flight hardware verification and validation of the K-line fire sensor payload on ZACube-2. SPIE. http://hdl.handle.net/10204/10970
Cogan, D, Derek J Griffith, Edwin Magidimisha, and R Van Zyl. "Flight hardware verification and validation of the K-line fire sensor payload on ZACube-2." (2018): http://hdl.handle.net/10204/10970
Cogan D, Griffith DJ, Magidimisha E, Van Zyl R, Flight hardware verification and validation of the K-line fire sensor payload on ZACube-2; SPIE; 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/10204/10970 .
Presented in: Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Sensors, MEMS and Electro-Optical Systems (SMEOS) Skukuza, South Africa, 8-10 October 2018. Due to copyright restrictions, the attached PDF file only contains the abstract of the full-text item. For access to the full-text item, please consult the publisher's website.