Award-Winning Thermal Imager Captures Data for Agriculture and Wildfire Monitoring

Goddard’s newest compact infrared sensor is licensed for commercial CubeSats, and under consideration for NASA Earth science missions.

It’s been an eventful few years for the Goddard-developed Compact Thermal Imager (CTI). In 2019, it received its first patent license, and in 2021, the CubeSat-compatible thermal imager was named co-winner of NASA’s Invention of the Year Award: honoring inventions that significantly contributed to NASA programs.

NASA recognized inventors Murzy Jhabvala, Donald Jennings, and Compton Tucker for their patent “Compact, High Resolution Thermal Infrared Imager,” which was submitted in 2014 and issued in 2019. This patented concept served as the basis for the CTI instrument that flew with Robotic Refueling Mission 3 from late 2018 to 2019 aboard the International Space Station. Over the course of several months, CTI captured more than 15 million infrared images of Earth in two spectral bands.

“I’m thrilled to see CTI acknowledged in this way,” Jhabvala said of the NASA Invention of the Year recognition. “It’s very gratifying to me and the team that NASA recognizes and utilizes this technology, particularly given some of the challenges we overcame to get to this point.”

The technology, conceived by Jhabvala at Goddard, is small enough to fit on miniaturized satellites, such as CubeSats, and represents the latest advances in infrared detectors. Funded by NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO) and bolstered by technology developed through the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, CTI represents many years of collaboration and innovation.

Murzy Jhabvala and his team are developing a Compact Thermal Imager 2, incorporating optical filters directly attached to an innovative new sensor.

Courtesy Murzy Jhabvala

CTI’s emerging strained layer superlattice (SLS) infrared detector technology — developed in 2012 and 2013 using Goddard’s Internal Research and Development (IRAD) funds — possesses several advantages over other competing infrared technologies. SLS detectors share qualities with quantum well detectors, such as low cost, relative ease of fabrication, and stability; however they are 10 times more sensitive, can be spectrally tuned, and can operate at much warmer temperatures. This allows the technology to fly on smaller platforms, since it can work with lighter and less power-intensive cooling systems.

Ultimately, CTI improves NASA’s ability to collect and analyze Earth images, gleaning science data that sheds light on topics related to climate change, wildfires, agriculture, and more. As a result of CTI’s successful 2019 mission, various SLS sensors are being considered for multiple NASA missions.

“This instrument is very versatile,” said Compton Tucker, a senior Earth scientist at Goddard and co-investigator for CTI. “As a new technology, it has tremendous usage potential in biomass burning and crop surface temperature.”

“CTI’s deployment on the space station was primarily a test of how well the hardware would perform in space. It was not initially designed as a science mission,” explained Doug Morton, chief of the Biospheric Sciences Laboratory at Goddard. “Nonetheless, CTI data proved scientifically useful as we monitored several high-profile fire outbreaks in the 2019 summer.”

CTI captured several images of the unusually severe fires in Australia that burned for four months in 2019-20. With its 80-meter (260 foot) per pixel resolution, CTI detected the shape and location of fire fronts and how far they were from settled areas — information critically important to first responders. Scientists have generally relied upon coarser resolution (375–1000 m) thermal data from the satellitebased Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) sensors to monitor fire activity from above.

Courtesy Murzy Jhabvala

A Georgia-based company called Cybercorps LLC licensed CTI in 2019, and plans to offer real-time agricultural data for farmers, resource managers, first responders, and other interested user groups by flying CTI on a CubeSat. The small spacecraft will capture thermal images while pointed at Earth’s surface.

Farmers and other interested customers can subscribe to Cybercorps’ service to access the thermal imaging data, which can be used to evaluate the health of agricultural and aquatic ecosystems. In combination with traditional techniques, this bundle of information could help farmers optimize fertilizer treatments and watering schedules.

“Technologies like CTI were developed for research purposes, but they often have additional applications outside of pure science,” said Eric McGill, a senior technology manager with the Strategic Partnerships Office at Goddard. “In this case, infrared imaging can play an important role in monitoring crop health and helping members of the agricultural community yield better harvests.”

In addition to CTI’s agricultural applications, Tucker said the technology can help detect wildfire activity by distinguishing between high combustion areas and less hot, smoldering sections of land. CTI’s observations of severe fires in Australia, the Amazon, India, and the U.S. detected the shape and location of fire fronts while also providing information on their distance from settled areas. For first responders, this data could influence life-saving evacuation plans.

Furthermore, CTI made fire observations with 20 times more detail than NASA’s Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) and with 190 times more detail than NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS). A fleet of CTI-like sensors could capture detailed measurements of wildfires several times a day, filling current gaps in coverage.

CTI’s technology pathfinder mission leveraged the collaborative efforts of multiple Goddard directorates as well as miniature integrated detector cooler assembly development by New Hampshire-based QmagiQ LLC, funded through NASA’s SBIR program. ESTO supported and funded CTI instrument development under the Sustainable Land Imaging Technology program.

ESTO has funded a follow-on instrument, CTI- 2, which is currently in development. CTI-2 will incorporate optical filters directly attached to an SLS detector that provides multi-spectral data. Two additional internal Goddard programs are supporting the development of detectors and instruments with different filters attached to the SLS detector assembly.

CONTACT: Murzy.D.Jhabvala@nasa.gov or 301-286- 5232