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This article reports on the long-term variation of the spectral smile and the full-width at half-maximum (FWHM) of the sensor response function for the Hyperspectral Imager Suite (HISUI) onboard the International Space Station (ISS). HISUI is an optical hyperspectral imager comprising two subsystems: a visible-and-near-infrared (VNIR) system covering 400–980 nm and a short-wave infrared (SWIR) system covering 895–2481 nm. On the basis of atmospheric corrections for actual observation images, we found that the characteristics of the spectral smile and the FWHM can be classified into five major periods. The results show that the first two transitions of the periods are due to updates of the smile correction table used in HISUI and that the last one is related to the occurrence of vertical stripes in the HISUI images. However, two unexpected changes are observed. One is a sudden increase in the spectral smile in the SWIR data to 2.0–2.1 nm on September 30, 2021, which was just three days after the second update of the smile correction table. The other is a sudden improvement on January 5, 2022, showing almost zero spectral smile and a nearly constant FWHM. Because neither sudden change is associated with HISUI or ISS operations/events, the optical and electrical systems of HISUI might exhibit instability, leading to sporadic changes of the spectral smile and FWHM. The findings of this study therefore suggest that, although the postlaunch spectral smile correction has been completed, continued long-term evaluation of the spectral stability is important.

Gold nanoantennas have been used in a variety of biomedical applications due to their attractive electronic and optical properties, which are shape- and size-dependent. Here, a periodic paired gold nanostructure exploiting surface plasmon resonance is proposed, which shows promising results for Refractive Index (RI) detection due to its high electric field confinement and diffraction limit. Here, single and paired gold nanostructured sensors were designed for real-time RI detection. The Full-Width at Half-Maximum (FWHM) and Figure-Of-Merit (FOM) were also calculated, which relate the sensitivity to the sharpness of the peak. The effect of different possible structural shapes and dimensions were studied to optimise the sensitivity response of nanosensing structures and identify an optimised elliptical nanoantenna with the major axis a, minor axis b, gap between the pair g, and heights h being 100 nm, 10 nm, 10 nm, and 40 nm, respectively. In this work, we investigated the bulk sensitivity, which is the spectral shift per refractive index unit due to the change in the surrounding material, and this value was calculated as 526–530 nm/RIU, while the FWHM was calculated around 110 nm with a FOM of 8.1. On the other hand, the surface sensing was related to the spectral shift due to the refractive index variation of the surface layer near the paired nanoantenna surface, and this value for the same antenna pair was calculated as 250 nm/RIU for a surface layer thickness of 4.5 nm.

Hyperspectral imaging has been widely applied in remote sensing scientific fields. For this study, hyperspectral imaging data covering the spectral region from 400 to 1000 nm were collected from an unmanned aerial vehicle visible/near-infrared imaging hyperspectrometer (UAV-VNIRIS). Theoretically, the spectral calibration parameters of the UAV-VNIRIS measured in the laboratory should be refined when applied to the hyperspectral data obtained from the UAV platform due to variations between the laboratory and actual flight environments. Therefore, accurate spectral calibration of the UAV-VNIRIS is essential to further applications of the hyperspectral data. Shifts in both the spectral center wavelength position and the full-width at half-maximum (FWHM) were retrieved using two different methods (Methods I and II) based on spectrum matching of atmospheric absorption features at oxygen bands near 760 nm and water vapor bands near 820 and 940 nm. Comparison of the spectral calibration results of these two methods over the calibration targets showed that the derived center wavelength and FWHM shifts are similar. For the UAV-VNIRIS observed data used here, the shifts in center wavelength derived from both Methods I and II over the three absorption bands are less than 0.13 nm, and less than 0.22 nm in terms of FWHM. The findings of this paper revealed: 1) the UAV-VNIRIS payload on the UAV platform performed well in terms of spectral calibration; and 2) the applied methods are effective for on-orbit spectral calibration of the hyper spectrometer.