Towards LST split-window algorithm FPGA implementation for CubeSats on-board computations purposes

ABSTRACT Nano, pico, and the so-called CubeSat satellites are taking place due to the emergent improvements in both high-performance nano and pico electronics and computational technologies. More than 1600 nanosats and CubeSats exist nowadays (i.e. 685 nanosats launched, 613 CubeSats launched, 405 nanosatellites in orbit, 321 operational nanosatellites, 71 nanosats destroyed on launch, etc.), with an incredible panoply of different constellations, governmental and non-governmental, high and easy to reach technologies, instruments in miniatures and missions from the military to universities and schools. This paper describes an approach to the implementation of the land surface temperature split-window (LST-SW) (Sobrino and Raissouni, IJRS 2000) algorithm structure based on the field programmable gate array (FPGA) technology. Due to the ever-increasing integrated circuit fabrication capabilities, the future of FPGA technology promises both higher densities and higher speeds for CubeSats on-board computations purposes. The research application shows the advantages of the used Xilinx Virtex-5 LX50 series FPGA approach in the LST-SW implementation with higher sampling rates than what is available from existing digital signal processing (DSP) chips, lower costs than an application specific integrated circuits (ASIC) for moderate volume applications and more flexibility than the alternate approaches. Since many current FPGA architectures are in-system programmable, the configuration of the device may be changed to implement different functionalities if required depending on the LST-SW parameters for each corresponding author. Finally, preliminary results show that the proposed LST-SW Xilinx Virtex-5 LX50 FPGA implementation approach is exceedingly flexible. Moreover, this implementation provides a considerable and promising performance that is suitable for future CubeSats on board LST-SW computations purposes.