This PDF file contains the front matter associated with SPIE Proceedings Volume 9977 including the Title Page, Copyright information, Table of Contents, Introduction, and Conference Committee listing.

The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) is the new US operational environmental imaging spectroradiometer in polar orbit. The first VIIRS flight unit onboard Suomi NPP has been providing high-quality visible/infrared Earth observations since 2011. VIIRS provides an unprecedented combination of higher spatial resolution data across a wider area and more complete spectral coverage with onboard calibration than legacy instruments including AVHRR developed in the 1970s for NOAA, OLS developed in the 1970s for US DoD, MODIS developed in the 1990s for the NASA Terra and Aqua satellites and SeaWiFS developed for the commercial SeaStar system in the 1990s. A highly sensitive low light level day/night band (DNB) in VIIRS is improving weather forecasting around the world and providing new ways to observe the Earth from space. VIIRS replaces four legacy sensors with a single instrument enabled by innovations that were driven by requirements defined by NPOESS in the late 1990s. This paper highlights innovations developed by the VIIRS design team in response to challenging driving NPOESS requirements that resulted in remarkable improvements in operational remote sensing.

An airborne 2-micron double-pulsed Integrated Path Differential Absorption (IPDA) lidar has been developed for atmospheric CO2 measurements. This instrument has been flown in spring of 2014 for a total of ten flights with 27 flight hours. The results of these test flights clearly show the capability of the lidar instrument to measure the total column amount of atmospheric CO2 from aircraft to the ground or cloud top.

Monitoring underground mine deformation and support conditions has traditionally involved visual inspection and geotechnical instrumentation. Monitoring displacements with conventional instrumentation can be expensive and time-consuming, and the number of locations that can be effectively monitored is generally limited. Moreover, conventional methods typically produce vector rather than tensor descriptions of geometry changes. Tensor descriptions can provide greater insight into hazardous ground movements, particularly in recently excavated openings and in older workings that have been negatively impacted by high stress concentrations, time-dependent deformation, or corrosion of ground support elements. To address these issues, researchers with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Spokane Mining Research Division are developing and evaluating photogrammetric systems for ground control monitoring applications in underground mines. This research has demonstrated that photogrammetric systems can produce millimeter-level measurements that are comparable to conventional displacement-measuring instruments. This paper provides an overview of the beneficial use of close-range photogrammetry for the following three ground control applications in underground mines: monitoring the deformation of surface support, monitoring rock mass movement, and monitoring the corrosion of surface support. Preliminary field analyses, case studies, limitations, and best practices for these applications are also discussed.

High temperature solid-oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) present a challenging harsh environment for sensor systems with temperatures above 800C and ambient hydrogen concentration potentially ranging from 0-100% across the cell’s anode. A strong gradient exists in both gas concentration and temperature from the fuel-inlet to outlet as fuel is consumed across the cell. We report a technique for measuring the spatial distribution of temperature along a solid-oxide fuel-cell interconnect channel using a distributed interrogation system coupled with a single-mode fiber optic thin-film evanescent wave absorption sensor. These sensors are to be operated inside an operating fuel-cell stack yielding spatially distributed measurements with sub-millimeter accuracy. Details are presented pertinent to the stable operation of silica optical fibers in the presence of high hydrogen concentration which can induce optical fiber losses. The stability of Rayleigh scattering centers is discussed with regard to the operational environment. The potential for extension of the approach to chemical (i.e. hydrogen) sensing as well as dual hydrogen/temperature sensor fabrication and stabilization are also briefly discussed.

The SeaHawk program is funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation of San Francisco, and managed by John Morrison of the University of North Carolina-Wilmington (UNC-W). Cloudland Instruments is developing SeaHawk’s multispectral ocean color imager, known as HawkEye. HawkEye optics, filters, detector arrays, and electronics form a cube just 10 cm on a side to fit the SeaHawk 3U CubeSat manufactured by Clyde Space, Glasgow Scotland. This paper discusses the system engineering approach to design, develop, complete, test, integrate and launch two SeaHawk CubeSats in three years within a $1.7M budget.

This paper describes a Coastal Water Camera System (CWCS) that provides the wide field of view, high spatial resolution and high SNR imaging spectroradiometry at ultraviolet (UV) through near infrared (NIR) wavelengths needed to meet challenging requirements for coastal water measurements from polar sun synchronous orbit (SSO). CWCS uses a flexible, modular architecture that can be scaled to fit within a wide range of mission resource constraints. CWCS includes 12 spectral bands selected from across a 375-960 nm spectral range. CWCS delivers the high spatial resolution (~50 m), high SNR (>775 in ~100 m pixel) UV-NIR measurements across a wide (~540 km) swath needed for effective coastal water imaging.

An automated spectroscopy system, which is divided into fix-angle and multi-angle subsystems, for collecting simultaneous, continuous and long-term measurements of canopy hyper-spectra in a crop ecosystem is developed. The fix-angle subsystem equips two spectrometers: one is HR2000+ (OceanOptics) covering the spectral range 200–1100 nm with 1.0 nm spectral resolution, and another one is QE65PRO (OceanOptics) providing 0.1 nm spectral resolution within the 730-780 nm spectral range. Both spectrometers connect a cosine-corrected fiber-optic fixed up-looking to collect the down-welling irradiance and a bare fiber-optic to measure the up-welling radiance from the vegetation. An inline fiber-optic shutter FOS-2x2-TTL (OceanOptics) is used to switch between input fibers to collect the signal from either the canopy or sky at one time. QE65PRO is used to permit estimation of vegetation Sun-Induced Fluorescence (SIF) in the O₂-A band. The data collection scheme includes optimization of spectrometer integration time to maximize the signal to noise ratio and measurement of instrument dark currency. The multi-angle subsystem, which can help understanding bidirectional reflectance effects, alternatively use HR4000 (OceanOptics) providing 0.1 nm spectral resolution within the 680-800 nm spectral range to measure multi-angle SIF. This subsystem additionally includes a spectrometer Unispec-DC (PPSystems) featuring both up-welling and down-welling channels with 3 nm spectral resolution covering the 300-1100 nm spectral range. Two down-looking fiber-optics are mounted on a rotating device PTU-D46 (FLIR Systems), which can rotate horizontally and vertically at 10° angular step widths. Observations can be used to calculate canopy reflectance, vegetation indices and SIF for monitoring plant physiological processes.

Laser ranging to satellites (SLR) in earth orbit is an established technology used for geodesy, fundamental science and precise orbit determination. A combined active and passive optical measurement system using a single telescope mount is presented which performs precise ranging measurements of retro reflector equipped objects in low earth orbit (LEO). The German Aerospace Center (DLR) runs an observatory in Stuttgart where a system has been assembled completely from commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components. The visible light directed to the tracking camera is used to perform angular measurements of objects under investigation. This is done astrometrically by comparing the apparent target position with cataloged star positions. First successful satellite laser ranging was demonstrated recently using an optical fiber directing laser pulses onto the astronomical mount. The transmitter operates at a wavelength of 1064 nm with a repetition rate of 3 kHz and pulse energy of 25 μJ. A motorized tip/tilt mount allows beam steering of the collimated beam with μrad accuracy. The returning photons reflected from the object in space are captured with the tracking telescope. A special low aberration beam splitter unit was designed to separate the infrared from visible light. This allows passive optical closed loop tracking and operation of a single photon detector for time of flight measurements at a single telescope simultaneously. The presented innovative design yields to a compact and cost effective but very precise ranging system which allows orbit determination.

Mars is characterized by rapidly changing, poorly understood weather that is a concern for future human missions. Future Areosynchronous Mars Orbit (AMO) communication satellites offer possible platforms for Mars weather imagers similar to the geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO) weather imagers that have been observing Earth since 1966. This paper describes an AReosynchronous Environmental Suite (ARES) that includes two imagers: one with two emissive infrared bands (10.8 μm and 12.0 μm) at 4 km resolution and the other with three VNIR bands (500 nm, 700 nm, 900 nm) at 1 km resolution. ARES stares at Mars and provides full disk coverage as fast as every 40 sec in the VNIR bands and every 2 min in the emissive bands with good sensitivity (SNR~200 in the VNIR for typical radiances and NEDT~0.2K at 180 K scene temperature in the emissive infrared). ARES size, mass, power and data rate characteristics are compatible with expectations for hosted payloads onboard future AMO communication satellites. Nevertheless, more work is needed to optimize ARES for future missions, especially in terms of trades between data rate, full disk coverage rate, sensitivity, number of spectral bands and spatial resolution and in study of approaches for maintaining accurate line of sight knowledge during data collection.

In this paper, we present infrastructure for accurate time and stable frequency distribution. It is based on sharing of fibers of research and educational network carrying data traffic. Accurate time and stable frequency transmission uses mainly created dark channels amplified by special bidirectional amplifiers with the same propagation path for both directions. Paper also targets challenges joined with bidirectional transmission, which represents directional non-reciprocities and interaction with parallel data transmissions.

The proliferation in the number of mobile devices and developments in cellular technology has led to an ever increasing demand for mobile data. The global bandwidth shortage facing wireless carriers today has motivated research for fifth generation (5G) cellular systems. In recent years, millimeter wave (mmW) frequencies between 30 and 300 GHz are being considered as a promising technology for 5G systems. Such systems can offer superior user experience by providing data rates that exceed one Gigabit per second and latencies lower than a millisecond. However, there is little research about cellular mmW propagation in densely populated urban environments. Understanding the radio channel is a primary requirement for optimal design of mmW systems. Radio propagation in mmW systems faces significant challenges due to rapidly varying channel conditions and intermittent connectivity. In this paper, we study the propagation of mmW spectrum in an urban environment. We use a statistical model to simulate an urban environment with diverse building distributions. We perform extensive simulations to analyze the path loss behavior for both line of sight (LOS) and non line of sight (NLOS) conditions for 28 GHZ and 73 GHZ mmW frequencies. We observe that the path loss approximates a logarithmic fit for both LOS and NLOS environments. Our simulations show that the omnidirectional free space path loss is approximately 30 dB higher for mmW systems compared to current 3G PP cellular systems. To address this challenge, we propose using highly directional horn antennas with beam forming for reducing the path loss.

With the rapid development of remote sensing technology, the spatial resolution and temporal resolution of satellite imagery also have a huge increase. Meanwhile, High-spatial-resolution images are becoming increasingly popular for commercial applications. The remote sensing image technology has broad application prospects in intelligent traffic. Compared with traditional traffic information collection methods, vehicle information extraction using high-resolution remote sensing image has the advantages of high resolution and wide coverage. This has great guiding significance to urban planning, transportation management, travel route choice and so on. Firstly, this paper preprocessed the acquired high-resolution multi-spectral and panchromatic remote sensing images. After that, on the one hand, in order to get the optimal thresholding for image segmentation, histogram equalization and linear enhancement technologies were applied into the preprocessing results. On the other hand, considering distribution characteristics of road, the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and normalized difference water index (NDWI) were used to suppress water and vegetation information of preprocessing results. Then, the above two processing result were combined. Finally, the geometric characteristics were used to completed road information extraction. The road vector extracted was used to limit the target vehicle area. Target vehicle extraction was divided into bright vehicles extraction and dark vehicles extraction. Eventually, the extraction results of the two kinds of vehicles were combined to get the final results. The experiment results demonstrated that the proposed algorithm has a high precision for the vehicle information extraction for different high resolution remote sensing images. Among these results, the average fault detection rate was about 5.36%, the average residual rate was about 13.60% and the average accuracy was approximately 91.26%.