NASA Mission to Measure Global Plant Physiology and Functional Types

A NASA Earth mission concept has been developed that focuses on a set of science objectives related to the measurement of plant physiology and functional type for terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. The NRC Decadal Survey specifically calls for the HyspIRI mission to measure terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. A review of the literature in conjunction with analysis of ongoing ecosystem research established imaging spectroscopy in the solar reflected portion of the spectrum as the appropriate approach to address these objectives. For these topics a detailed requirement analysis was performed that specified the measurement objectives, measurement requirements, instrument requirement and other requirements. These were distilled into a single set of spectral, radiometric, spatial, uniformity and temporal requirement. Key among these are: spectral coverage from 380 to 2500 nm at 10 nm sampling, radiometric resolution and precision giving high signal-to-noise ratios for dark aquatic targets, spatial sampling of 60 m, spectral and spectral IFOV uniformity > 95%, and temporal coverage with a 19 day repeat at the equator.