Marine litter causes enormous damage to ecosystems and has become a concern for human health, since plastic has been found entering the food chain. 

To try to solve this, research and industrial communities are now working on systems for detecting and/or capturing marine litter debris. Satellite-based detection approaches, in particular, are still in the early stage of their development and need to be validated with ground truth data and observations.

The activity placed three 10x10m targets covered in different types of common plastics into a bay in the Azores (see image), and was able to identify the relevant spectral bands a spectrometer would need for the detection of this plastic marine litter. It also identified the spectra datasets at different altitudes and the data processing techniques and algorithms needed for the detection of plastic marine litter.