SHALOM – A Commercial Hyperspectral Space Mission

In March 2012 the Italy Space Agency (ASI) and Israeli Space Agency (ISA) have agreed to support space industries from both countries, in order to perform a joint study of the feasibility of development, launch and operation of a commercial hyperspectral remote sensing (HRS) satellite in orbit. Soon after, the mission was named as the Space-borne Hyperspectral Applicative Land and Ocean Mission (SHALOM). Several organizations in both countries were incorporated in the mission, including in Israel: Israel Aerospace Industry (IAI) - MBT, Elbit Systems, elOP, and in Italy: Selex, Telespazio and Thales Alenia Space Italy (TASI). The main idea is to make this hyperspectral instrument fully commercialized and to provide innovative applications to a wide range of end users worldwide. In November 2013 the feasibility stage (Phase A) has been accomplished and the project is waiting for an approval to go for Phase B.
This chapter summarizes the Phase A study and provides some important statements about the foreseen commercial operation of hyperspectral technology on orbit. The main (declared) specifications of SHALOM senor are: 10 m spatial resolution with a 2.5 m panchromatic sharp channel, 240 spectral channels across the visible, near infrared and shortwave infrared (VIS-NIR-SWIR) region with 10nm spectral resolution and revisit time of 4 days. This initiative is purely dedicated to commercial applications and a business plan with a market investigation demonstrated that this direction is promising. Nonetheless, there are interaction between both the academia and industry sectors from both Israel and Italy to investigate the best market targeting. The uniqueness of SHALOM will be not only lean on its high quality data and performance but also on the fact that for the first time delivery of products will be done according to a direct demand of the end users themselves. Some mature applications are reported in this chapter for the first Level 3 products such as: précising agriculture, urban monitoring, soil contamination and water monitoring (oceans and inland water bodies). The program aim is to provide thematic solutions to potential end users in diverse disciplines worldwide and to support advance usage of the HSR technology in land and coast land areas. In this chapter selected technical aspects and specifications of the SHALOM mission are reported and information on the mission as a whole is provided.