Optical Compressive Sensing Technologies For Space Applications: A Pros And Cons Analysis Of Application-Driven Instrumental Concepts

Compressive Sensing (CS) is a novel signal acquisition technique that takes advantage from the feature of many natural signals of being sparse. The basic idea is that, if prior knowledge about the signal's sparsity is available, the signal can be reconstructed using fewer samples than those envisaged by Shannon's Theorem. The European Space Agency has funded a project to investigate the potential of CS-based optical systems for space applications, and to demonstrate the existence of substantial advantages - with respect to a traditional system - in terms of resources required for its development and its performance. In this paper we present the results of the first step of the project, which consisted in a general analysis and assessment of the possible use of CS technologies in optical instruments for space applications and the comparison of their performances with respect to those of traditional systems.