Science Lead

A General description of the Science role for all missions:

In one sentence:

The Science subsystem is in charge of defining and implementing the satellite’s mission objective(s).

Many of the higher level parent requirements for the satellite (especially in the case of the payload(s)) need to be carefully defined by Science. In addition to defining requirements, it is also Science’s responsibility to ensure that these requirements are understood by the rest of the team so that design decisions for the bus and payload are made with appreciation of the Scientific Objective(s). Therefore, competency in research as well as communication with the engineering teams are required to take on a leadership role in the Science subsystem.

Situations will occur where Scientific requirements need to be re-evaluated due to fiscal and physical engineering constraints during the design process. Therefore, the Science lead should expect to be flexible and understand the difficulties of other subsystems in order to mediate scientific requirements with engineering constraints.

In addition to defining and implementing requirements, the Science subsystem may be tasked with carrying out the analysis of Scientific data recovered from the missions payload. This is certainly the case with the FINCH mission.

Description of Duties for Remainder of FINCH Mission

The name, FINCH, is an acronym for the current satellite’s Scientific mission: Field Imaging Nano-satellite for Crop residue Hyper-spectral mapping. Put simply, the objective is to acquire hyper-spectral images of agricultural fields and determine the percentage of crop residue in each field. There are five levels of Scientific Mission Success that have been previously outlined by the Science Team:

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There are four key projects that the Science Team is responsible for within the FINCH Mission.

1. Linear Spectral Mixing Model (LMM): Abundance Estimation
   1. Success at the fidelity of Science Objective Level 4 specifically implicates the contribution of the Science team. Science will need to successfully fit a model to the satellite image that extracts the crop residue percentages (abundances) for targeted crop fields.
2. Ground Truth Missions: Ground Truth Operations
   1. The collection of Ground Truth data is essential in order to achieve a high fidelity LMM
   2. We are currently partnered with:
      1. Rutherford Farms near Winnipeg Manitoba whose crops fields will be the target of the FINCH mission.
      2. EMILI Innovation Farms who works with Rutherford Farms and is our point of contact for all ground truth missions on site.
      3. The AAFC which also has a close relationship with EMILI and has provided us with technology and knowledge in order to facilitate Ground Truth data collection
   3. We also have an account and access to the EnMAP hyper-spectral satellite which should be leveraged to acquire satellite imagery of Rutherford Farms prior to the launch of FINCH
   4. It is the responsibility of the Science lead to maintain good relationships with all of our partners and to pursue Ground Truth missions until the termination of the FINCH mission
3. Defining and Implementing High Level Scientific Requirements
   1. This is a standard and general role for the Science Team (as outlined in the previous section)
4. Maintaining High Literacy in the Scientific Objectives of the Satellite Across the Entire Team
   1. This is a standard and general role for the Science Team (as outlined in the previous section)