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TRW, under a Small Satellite Technology Initiative (SSTI) contract, is building the Lewis satellite. The principal sensor on Lewis is a hyperspectral imaging spectrometer. Part of the SSTI mission is to establish the commercial and educational utility of this data and the hyperspectral data already being acquired on airborne platforms. Essential requirements are rapid availability (after data acquisition) and easy accessibility to a catalog of images and imagery products. Each image is approximately 256 by 512 pixels with 384 bands of data acquired at each pixel. For some applications, some users will want the entire data sets; in other cases partial data sets (e.g. three band images) will be all that a user can handle or need for a given application. In order to make the most effective use of this new imagery and justify the cost of collecting it, we must find ways to make the information it contains more readily accessible to an ever broadening community of potential users. Tools are needed to store, access, and communicate the data more efficiently, to place it in context, and to derive both qualitative and quantitative information from it. A variety of information products which address the specific needs of particular user communities will be derived from the imagery. The data is unique in its ability to provide high spatial and spectral resolution simultaneously, and shows great promise in both military and civilian applications. A data management and analysis system has been built at TRW. This development has been prompted by the business opportunities, by the series of instruments built here and by the availability of data from other instruments. The products of the processing system have been shown to prospective customers in the U.S. and abroad. The system has been used to process data produced by TRW sensors and other instruments. This paper provides an overview of the TRW hyperspectral collection, data handling and exploitation capability.
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