Teledyne Brown Engineering (TBE) located in Huntsville, Alabama, USA, and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), Germany, operate a hyperspectral instrument integrated in the Multi-User-System for Earth Sensing (MUSES) platform installed on the International Space Station (ISS).
The MUSES platform was launched in June 2017 with SpaceX-11 and integrated to the ISS several days later. The launch of DESIS to ISS was on June, 29th 2018 by SpaceX-15. End of August, 2018, DESIS was unpacked and mounted on board the ISS. DESIS is the first instrument to utilise the MUSES external payload accommodation. The instrument DESIS is developed by DLR and delivered to TBE for integration into MUSES. TBE operates, commands and monitors DESIS with an own Ground Segment including processing, calibration, monitoring, validation and data dissemination.
DESIS has been designed, built and calibrated within 3 1/2 years at DLR. The commissioning and validation phase was finished in March 2019. DESIS is working now operationally and will continue at least until the end of 2023.
Generally, DESIS is a predominantly commercial mission. TBE has the exclusive right to license and transfer image data for commercial use. DLR has the right to task DESIS or request archived data for scientific and humanitarian purposes. For this purpose, TBE provides DLR a NOAA license that is applicable to image and auxiliary data of the MUSES Platform (e.g. inertial measurements, star tracker attitude measurements, orbit data, calibration and instrument housekeeping data relevant to the processing of the image data). DLR can task DESIS data at least 2,000 minutes per calendar year divided evenly over each month (i.e., approximately 167 minutes per month). Instrument data from the TBE archive (catalogue data) are available without quota, but have to be released by TBE.
Parameter
Value
Target lifetime
2018-2023
Orbit type (local time at equator, inclination, altitude, period, repeat cycle)
not sun-synchronous (various, 51.6°, 400 ± 5 km, 93 min, no repeat cycle)
Coverage
55° N to 52° S ~ 90% of populated Earth
Revisit frequency
3 to 5 days (strongly depends on frequency of orbit manoeuvres – see also section orbit characteristics)
