06/10/2026
Dr. Sunip Mukherjee is traveling from UMass Lowell to NASA Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility https://www.csbf.nasa.gov in Palestine TX where the instrument he designed, CLIC, will be flown very soon! The Compact Large Sensor Imaging Camera is capable of high resolution (~2 arc second, 1/3600 of a degree) imaging with approximately 4 degree (the moon is approximately 0.5 degrees in the sky) field-of-view. It achieves this in a roughly 4 in x 3 in package (not considering the cooling attached to the detector). The CLIC x2 mission will fly the CLIC imager to obtain earth imagery from high-altitude, and process the images on-board using a machine-learning model running on an off-the-shelf FPGA to detect (and mask) clouds in the images. CLIC x2 aims to demonstrate reduction in data storage/bandwidth requirements, and improvements to automatic exposure compensation algorithms by ignoring pixels that do not contain useful information. CLIC x2 is designed as a reusable platform for future flights with more complex data processing models, as well as advanced optical capabilities (e.g. multi-spectral imaging). Operations start June 16, 2026 and launches occur daily between 06:30 and 07:00, with a daily show time" determined at 14:00. Public viewing details can be found here https://www.csbf.nasa.gov/palestine/psn.html Stay tuned for more details!
