The nature of optical diffraction limits the spatial resolution of a space-borne optical sensor to the diffraction limit. Using the Rayleigh criterion, we match the Airy Diameter of the optical sensor to the pitch size of a selected imaging detector, or vice versa. Since there is little choice when selecting space-proven imaging detectors, conventional approaches have few options for payload optimization in terms of compactness or volume. In this paper, we first propose an innovative concept of volume sharing multi-aperture payloads to achieve ground spatial resolutions several times higher than conventional approaches. With this approach, we can achieve 1 m ground sampling distance (GSD) at 500 km altitude with a small satellite of less than 100U volume.
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