Overview

This short guide presents a quick and dirty introduction to the FINCH mission and the spacecraft we’re building to tackle the mission (spoilers, there are no birds involved). This guide is only updated during recruitment cycles. For the source truth of the design, refer to the or speak with the system leads.

For team-specific onboarding, refer to the onboarding materials on the homepages. For a more comprehensive breakdown of the FINCH mission, check out our FINCH Summer 2023 Critical Design Review.

The Mission

The FINCH mission objective is to conduct crop residue mapping over Canada. Crop residue mapping involves the use of remote sensing technology, such as satellites or drones, to collect data on the amount and distribution of plant material left in a field after harvest. This information is crucial for understanding soil health, managing agricultural waste, and optimizing sustainable farming practices [src].

At a high-level, the concept of operations for the FINCH mission is as follows:

1. Launch the satellite into Low Earth Orbit (LEO)
2. Take pictures of crop fields in the Short-Wave Infrared Range (SWIR)
3. Downlink those pictures to our mission control center
4. Process the images using a special algorithm (spectral mixture analysis, SMA) to distinguish areas of crop residue from soil and other materials in our images

FINCH concept of operations

Based on that mission profile, there are a number of scientific requirements we have to design our spacecraft and payload around:

• Spatial resolution: < 90m x 90m or as small as possible
• Spectral Resolution: < 10nm
• Spectral Range: 900 - 1700nm or as wide as possible
• SNR: > 30 or as large as possible

All requirements can be found in . Requirements drive all our design work on Space Systems. You can learn more about requirements here: Requirements Engineering.