Huntsville, AL – Yesterday marks the 5^th anniversary of Teledyne Brown Engineering’s (TBE) International Space Station (ISS)-based Multi-User System for Earth Sensing (MUSES). MUSES is a precision-pointing platform for earth-viewing instruments, such as high-resolution digital cameras and hyperspectral imagers. MUSES can accommodate four payloads simultaneously and the ISS can robotically change, upgrade, and service those instruments.

Teledyne Brown is responsible for the entire life cycle of MUSES from design, manufacturing, testing and integration, to ongoing flight operations and maintenance. MUSES was developed as part of a cooperative agreement with NASA and provides opportunities for imaging, technology demonstration, and space qualification of payloads supporting research, scientific studies, and humanitarian efforts for government and commercial customers. In five years of service on the ISS, MUSES has performed 43,000+ hours of operations, made 29,000+ orbits around the earth, and traveled 77,000,000+ kilometers.

A year after MUSES was operational on the ISS, the German Aerospace Center’s (DLR) Earth Sensing Imaging Spectrometer (DESIS) was installed on the MUSES platform. Developed in cooperation with TBE, DESIS is a hyperspectral sensor with 235 bands spaced at 2.55nm in the visible through near-infrared spectral region. DESIS is supporting resource and environmental monitoring and has collected over 125,000,000+ square kilometers of hyperspectral imagery of Earth. TBE has distributed DESIS data to 450+ customers and organizations to support business and research.

TBE’s President Scott Hall commented, “This program is the result of our forward-thinking engineers with the support of NASA. Together, our team designed a system to promote efforts to commercialize the International Space Station in addition to humanitarian and environmental efforts.”

As the first commercially operated, remote sensing hosted payload platform on the ISS, MUSES has proven to be a robust system that continues to function flawlessly in the extreme conditions of space.

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Images provided by Teledyne Brown Engineering.