Recent developments in optical fabrication, detector technologies and spectral filter allow very compact telescopes and spectrometers designs, although less performing than large ones. The combination with clever algorithms for spectral analysis of Earth scenes opens the possibility to develop innovative compact instruments that overcome data downlink limitations for nanosats and target new applications, such as early warning, change detection of land cover and land usage.

In this development, the testing of the manufactured engineering model HyperCube proved good performance. The algorithms were produced for a variety of selected applications (water and vegetation monitoring, fire and flood detection, land cover and land use change detection). The on-board processing capability allows the system to generate data products with quasi-real time information.

This miniaturized system is a small, cost-effective and reconfigurable payload. It can be used in a large variety of missions: from large-scale, as support instrument to larger ones, to small scale, giving commercially valuable data products.