Hyper-Spectral Imager in visible and near-infrared band for lunar compositional mapping

Abstract

India’s first lunar mission, Chandrayaan-1, will have a Hyper-Spectral Imager in the visible and near-infrared spectral bands along with other instruments. The instrument will enable mineralogical mapping of the Moon’s crust in a large number of spectral channels. The planned Hyper-Spectral Imager will be the first instrument to map the lunar surface with the capability of resolving the spectral region, 0.4 to 0.92 Μm, in 64 continuous bands with a resolution of better than 15 nm and a spatial resolution of 80 m. Spectral separation will be done using a wedge filter and the image will be mapped onto an area detector. The detector output will be processed in the front-end processor to generate the 64-band data with 12-bit quantization. This paper gives a description of the Hyper-Spectral Imager instrument.