Autonomy for remote sensing — Experiences from the IPEX CubeSat

The Intelligent Payload Experiment (IPEX) is a CubeSat mission to flight validate technologies for onboard instrument processing and autonomous operations for NASA´s Earth Science Technologies Office (ESTO). Specifically IPEX is to demonstrate onboard instrument processing and product generation technologies for the Intelligent Payload Module (IPM) of the proposed Hyperspectral Infra-red Imager (HyspIRI) mission concept. Many proposed future missions, including HyspIRI, are slated to produce enormous volumes of data requiring either significant communication advancements or data reduction techniques. IPEX demonstrates several technologies for onboard data reduction, such as computer vision, image analysis, image processing and in general demonstrates general operations autonomy. We conclude this paper with a number of lessons learned through operations of this technology demonstration mission on a novel platform for NASA.