Space to Soil

The University of Chicago Space Program proposes the Thermal Optical Recognition and Communication Hardware (TORCH) instrument, a 3U CubeSat instrument that reduces this latency to under 5 minutes. TORCH combines a dual-channel remote sensing payload, consisting of a longwave infrared (LWIR) uncooled microbolometer and a shortwave infrared (SWIR) InGaAs imager, with the PULSE-A optical communications terminal developed by our team, enabling onboard fire detection and immediate high-bandwidth downlink of event imagery within a single orbital pass. The sensing pipeline performs frame-to-frame thermal change detection synchronized with SWIR cross-modal validation, constituting a genuinely adaptive onboard processing system that modifies its own acquisition behavior in response to observed conditions.