CHRIS celebrates 8th year onboard Proba-1

Remote sensing

SSTL is celebrating the 8th year in orbit of the high resolution CHRIS Imager, which was launched on-board the European Space Agency’s PROBA-1 mission, in October 2001.

Chichester Harbour, UK
The Compact High Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (CHRIS) is a highly versatile hyperspectral system that was developed by SSTL’s Optical Payload Group. CHRIS was one of many instruments on-board the mission, with the others including a Space Radiation Environment Monitor (SREM) and a Payload Autonomous Star Sensor (PASS).

CHRIS offers the highest spatial resolution of any hyperspectral system currently in orbit and can provide simultaneous images of the Earth in 19 wavebands. This allows for many features of the images it produces to be identified and analysed.

This high resolution imager enables ESA’s Proba-1 mission to acquire detailed images of the Earth. The result – stunning images of natural and urban phenomena.

A cropped CHRIS satellite image of San Diego


Many more images can be seen on ESA’s website including that of the Mauna Kea Volcano, Hawaii and Tokyo.

CHRIS can be used for many applications, including precision farming, disaster monitoring, air quality assessment and seabed classification, and has proved so successful that it has paved the way for advanced sibling CHRIS-2, which allows for other valuable applications to be addressed, including mineralogy and pollution monitoring.

The CHRIS Imager is not the only family to have grown, as the ESA’s Proba-1 mission has now been joined in orbit by Proba-2, which was successfully launched yesterday.

In addition to SSTL's CHRIS hyperspectral imager, ESA's 8-year old PROBA-1 mission has been continuing to depend on a number of sub-systems provided by SSTL (incorporating contributions from Space Innovations Limited). These include the power system, communications system, AOCS sensors, the Data Handling System computer and the SGR-20 Space GPS receiver. All systems remain fully operational in the primary chain of the satellite and have served to enable the extended life imagery capture from the CHRIS and HRC payloads.

This entry was posted by Robin Wolstenholme on Thursday, November 5. 2009 at 07:37. and is filed under Remote sensing. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own blog. All new comments are subject to moderation before being displayed.
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