The development of a satellite-borne earth imaging system for UOSAT

Design considerations for the earth imaging system of the University of Surrey Satellite (UOSAT) were that power consumption, weight, and size of the unit be kept low, and that the data be assembled in a format which could be received with very simple apparatus and displayed on a domestic television receiver. Such an imager was developed using a two-dimensional charge-coupled device array. The camera resolution is 256 x 256 pixels with a 16 level gray scale. An alternative buffer store is necessary to reduce the data rate and maintain image integrity. a 32 K byte memory using dynamic MOS RAMs is employed. The receiving apparatus consists of a standard 2m frequency modulation receiver and a simple monostable type decoder which extracts the data and clock waveform from the synchronous FSK signal.