NASA's AVIRIS (Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer)
Identifying and measuring constituents of the Earth's surface and atmosphere
the
AVIRIS (Airborne Visible/Infrared
Imaging Spectrometer) earth remote-sensing instrument scans the ground below while it flies aboard Twin
Otter and ER-2 aircraft. Its 224 wavelength-sensitive detectors obtain spectral data which will be processed
for display as images and to reveal information about the viewed area's composition. AVIRIS was developed
for NASA at the California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. AVIRIS first went into
service in 1987, three years after the start of design and construction.
AVIRIS operates under a mission-critical, non-stop, digital control subsystem, at the
heart of which the LynxOS® real-time operating system runs on an Intel® 8085A-2 microprocessor.
An additional role of this control subsystem is to interface with the plane's navigation computer so that
flight parameter data can be recorded along with the data obtained by the AVIRIS instrument.