Compressive sensing and space applicat ions in the SWIR-FIR spectral range

Compressive Sensing (CS) is a novel signal acquisition technique based on the sparsity of many natural signals. 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. In particular, space applications in the SWIR-FIR spectral range are an appealing field for CS techniques due to the possibility to use of a single element detector instead of 2D arrays and to reduce requirements in terms of payload budgets and downlink requirements. Here we discuss several payload configurations that could benefit from CS approach and perform a pros and cons analysis.