Professional: Modular Imaging Spectrometer Instrument (MISI)
Most of the remote sensing community moved away from operating, not to mention building, instruments as electro-optical sensing replaced photography. A very large fraction of our graduates went to work for the government or aerospace industry building or buying instrumentation and sensors in particular. We decided it was important to continue to operate and where possible to integrate or even build from scratch instruments and occasional sensor systems. This was the only way to keep ourselves current and to expose students to the science and issues associated with building complex electro-optical systems. This page tells a little of the story of one instrument. As our airborne infrared scanner aged we looked to replace it with a new instrument. At a minimum we needed a higher resolution lower noise multi band imager. Ideally we wanted to acquire an imaging spectrometer to let us experiment with the latest technology. At the time there were not many commercial systems being built. If we could have gotten an aerospace contractor to build a one of a kind instrument the cost would have been many hundreds of thousands of dollars. So in the early 1990s we decided to slowly build our own with the requirement that the thermal instrument must be good and the visible/near infrared spectrometer would be an experiment. In the end we built a great thermal instrument and a mediocre spectrometer. However the spectrometer was a complete success in terms of letting both our faculty and students learn an incredible amount before most of the remote sensing community was working with spectrometer data. It also provided the credibility we needed to continue to work on a wide range of instrument programs for a range of sponsors.
Hyperspectral Imaging concept illustrated using a MISI image of Irondequoit bay. Many stacked spectral bands form an image cube (75 for MISI) and each pixel can be probed to see the spectrum associated with that point on the ground
MISI in the lab, the two ears at the top are the visible and infrared spectrometers, the belt at the bottom is driving the 6 inch in diameter scan mirror, and the bright box bottom left is the back (cooling fins) of one of the two blackbodies used for calibration. The entire instrument would be placed in the belly of a six seat aircraft with about half dropping below the floor into the camera hole
John with MISI in the lab along side the integrating sphere light source used to calibrate the visible/near infrared spectrometers
John in lab looking into the MISI scan mirror and telescope assembly
Detail of thermal Image from MISI showing the Ginna power plant and cooling water discharge. MISI would be extensively used to fly under Landsat satellites to verify and update their thermal calibration
Top, three mile long image cube of Lake Ontario shore line from MISI’s visible/near infrared spectrometers with three bands used to form a true color image on top of the cube, bottom, a MISI thermal infrared image acquired simultaneously showing the hot water discharge at the Ginna nuclear power plant