09/09/2021
And the award goes to…
The Compact Thermal Imager (CTI)! The CTI won NASA’s Invention of the Year Award for 2021—a distinction which honors inventions that significantly contributed to NASA programs.
The shoebox-sized infrared imager made big waves from its perch on our Robotic Refueling Mission 3 (RRM3) module currently on the International Space Station.
CTI provided high-resolution, real-time images of the Earth which inform on issues including wildfires, agriculture, and climate change.
During its time with RRM3 from late 2018 to 2019, CTI gathered over 15 million infrared images of the Earth. Flying on RRM3 allowed the instrument to capture higher-resolution images from Space Station than the infrared images produced by Landsat 8. This is because of CTI’s advanced imaging system and because Station is closer to the Earth than Landsat 8 is.
Because CTI took images in infrared, it detected objects by their temperature. This is something that cannot be done by our eyes or most phone cameras, which see objects in the visible light spectrum. As a result, CTI captured images which measured the temperatures of fires, residual warm spots, farmland, rivers, coastal regions and the nightside of the Earth.
The data CTI produced is helping NASA to better keep track of and anticipate phenomena impacting our home planet. We’re honored to have had NASA’s invention of the year on our hardware and look forward to the continued impact its data will have!
Read more about this innovative technology that has enhanced life on Earth from space: https://bit.ly/3kRx6S9
Read more about RRM3: https://nexis.gsfc.nasa.gov/RRM3.html
