Compact Midwave Imaging System (CMIS) for Near-Real-Time Cloud Sensing

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) has recently begun the development of a compact, light-weight, and low power mid-infrared imager, the Compact Midwave Imaging Sensor (CMIS), under the support of NASA ESTO Instrument Incubator Program (IIP). The goal of this CMIS instrument development and demonstration (IIP-IDD) project is to increase the technical readiness of CMIS, a multi-spectral sensor, for high spatial resolution stereo imaging of clouds capable of retrieving 3d winds and cloud heights both day and night with rapid revisit time. Until recently, for midwave-IR (MWIR) sensing, only cryogenically cooled detector technologies such as InSb and HgCdTe have been available used for space applications. Because these technologies require cryogenic temperatures to obtain the necessary sensitivity, MWIR sensors have relatively large size, weight, and power (SWaP) requirements and thus usually need to fly on large spacecraft. The low-cost, low-SWaP CMIS solution is based on the use of a sensor that requires less cooling, leveraging recent advances in MWIR detector technology. The low resources required for CMIS potentially allows it to be accommodated on smaller spacecraft such as CubeSats, which will enable a multi-satellite constellation to meet NASA science objectives and AF/NOAA operational requirements for high spatial resolution and frequent revisits. In this paper, an overview of the CMIS project, including the high-level sensor design, the concept of operations, and measurement capability will be presented.