American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics 1 Integrated VIS-NIR Hyperspectral / Thermal-IR Electro-Optical Payload System for a Mini-UAV Giancarlo Rufino * and Antonio Moccia. † University of Naples “Federico II”, Napoli, I-80125, Italy This paper presents the development of a modern electro-optical payload system for remote sensing from a mini-UAV. It is aimed at applications of natural disasters monitoring, in particular forest fires. Both the sensor and the mini-UAV platform are being developed at the Dept. of Space Science and Engineering (DISIS) of the University of Naples “Federico II.” The core of the system is an integrated, multi-band sensor that includes a thermal imager and a hyperspectral sensor in VNIR band. Instrument characterization, laboratory tests, and payload architecture are discussed. I. Introduction Remote Sensing (RS) for monitoring and management of natural disasters is of great interest currently and increasing attention is being gained by forest fires because of their frequent occurrence and the relevance of the damage they cause. There exists several studies dealing with applications of RS to detect forest fires and to monitor them for suppression and damage mitigation [1,2,3], as well as experiments have been carried out for technology demonstration [4, 5]. Both aeronautical and satellite platforms have been considered, showing relevant performance and limitations. The latter ones, in particular, can be pointed out after considering the main issues of an ideal system for monitoring forest fires to the aim of suppression and damage mitigation [6]: ability to detect fire in its early stage and to distinguish the associated degree of danger; day-and-night operation capability; detection of fire location, extension, as well as propagation direction in relation to topography and forest resources (vegetation and fuels). Additional desirable features are long observation time ability to follow the whole duration of the event, and real- time transmission of the acquired data to users, i.e., fire management personnel, in format that allows for immediate exploitation by disaster management operators rather than RS application specialists. Because of these requirements, satellite-based systems, that showed adequate measurement performance in several experiments and that were limited only in resolution in some cases, have poor performance in terms of coverage ability [7,8]. The latter one, in fact, is restricted both in space and time because it is constrained by orbit ground track repetitivity, typically in the order of days or even weeks for medium/high resolution RS systems performing global coverage. Hence, such systems are often not available for observation at site and time of a fire event, and almost certainly they cannot follow fire evolution but just offer a single survey of it; neither platform passes over the area of interest can be adjusted for the peculiar extension and evolution of the fire under observation. On the other hand, airborne platforms offer plenty of interesting capabilities for this application: timely observation (limited only by ground base distance from the area of the event and availability of operational units), survey flight trajectory not fixed a priori but adaptable to the case and, in particular, flight altitude modifiable to satisfy resolution and instantaneous coverage requirements, flight duration that can be extended and flights that can be repeated as needed. Finally, also issues concerning distribution of acquired data is in favor of aeronautical platforms. In fact, for typical satellite RS systems, download of acquired data is not continuous but subdue to ground station links that can operate only during limited fractions of orbits. Differently, data can be transmitted from an airplane in real time by exploiting high- capacity channel radio links to a ground station or satellite communications. Then, data distribution to users community can be accomplished by means of existing networks, even the internet [6]. Recent technology progress has made possible to base the above applications on UAV platforms [4,5]. First, modern electronics, also Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components, is characterized by high performance in spite of reduced size, mass and power consumption, so that even complex, integrated systems (RS sensors, on-board avionics and MEMS devices, computers running software logic for autonomous flight and payload operation control) are suitable for installation on board of UAVs that, typically, have limited availability of resources. Also, * Staff scientist, Department of Space Science and Engineering, Piazzale Tecchio 80, Napoli. † Full professor, Department of Space Science and Engineering, Piazzale Tecchio 80, Napoli, AIAA Member. Infotech@Aerospace 26 - 29 September 2005, Arlington, Virginia AIAA 2005-7009 Copyright © 2005 by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc. All rights reserved.