Mission 2: CFC

Mission 2: Cirrus Flux Camera (CFC)
Cirrus cloud science Ftw

Cirrus clouds

We don't know a lot about cirrus clouds. They're hard to see, especially from satellites. But they're really important for global climate models; cirrus clouds let visible light from the sun through, which heats up the Earth. The Earth radiates this heat as infrared radiation, but cirrus clouds reflect this heat back down to Earth. So the total coverage of cirrus clouds really, really affects climate models.

The mission of OreSat's Cirrus Flux Camera is to help map the global distribution of cirrus clouds using a special camera that sees short wave infrared light. This is an extremely challenging project, so we've enrolled our colleagues at the Laboratory for Aerosol and Cloud Optics (LACO) at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) and the Imaging Group at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory at University College London (UCL) to help us out!

SWIR Camera

It's not science unless you have a huge bulky, power hungry science instrument on your satellite! OK, this might be one of the smallest SWIR cameras to fly in space, but it's huge for us. Find out more in our mechanical CAD!

Identifying Cirrus Clouds

There's a lot of image processing to take a SWIR image (like this one from the NASA MODIS instrument on the Terra spacecraft) and identify the cirrus clouds. More on these algorithms coming soon from our science partners at UMBC and UCL!