LandSat Next Instrument Image Processing Compression Pipeline – from Photons to Data Cubes

The ongoing development of payload electronics at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and RTX to support the LandSat Next Instrument Suite (LandIS) as part of the long-tenured USGS/NASA LandSat mission has resulted in the development of a novel image processing and compression pipeline to move 1.8Gbps of scientific data to the host spacecraft. This pipeline contains functions to communicate with three different focal plane arrays, to apply data corrections and aggregations on incoming pixels, and to compress the final image products for transmission to the ground. This real-time, near-lossless data compression implementation on FPGA, conformant with CCSDS 123.0-B-2 [4], was developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) [2,3]. The image processing pipeline used is part of a larger science observation campaign envisaged as a series of studies that are scheduled using a macro execution engine maintained by Flight Software (FSW). This paper discusses the design and architecture of the LandIS image processing and compression pipeline hardware and associated controlling firmware and software employed to meet the various engineering and payload science requirements of the LandSat Next instrument.