Designing space electronic and optical hardware to survive lunar night is hard. Not only do they need to withstand the radiation and abrasive regolith environment, and deal with the often limited and intermittent communications link back to Earth, they also need to be designed to survive temperature extremes from -200 deg C through +70 deg C. When Canadensys needed a compact camera system for our upcoming lunar rover missions that could robustly survive this harsh environment, we could not find anything with these capabilities anywhere on the market, so we developed our own NISA (Nano Immersive Situational Awareness) family of cameras with the very specialized robust electronics and optics.

It turns out that a camera robust enough to survive lunar night (temperature, radiation, abrasives, communications, etc.) can also be used on a wide range of space mission throughout the solar system. For this reason, customers who demand the most robust camera solution have used our Canadensys NISA cameras not only for lunar surface missions, but for other intense civilian and defence mission in Earth orbit and beyond. Our cameras were instrumental in the success of the first successful commercial soft landing lunar mission: Intuitive Machines 1. With a total of 7 cameras on the mission, various Canadensys cameras provided narrow field of view high resolution images, wide-angle contextual landscape views, and one was even configured as a telescope for precise astronomical observation of the stars from the surface of the Moon. NASA has also selected a multi-spectral microscope version of the Canadensys camera as one of the key instruments for the 2024 NASA Lunar Vertex exploration mission to the Moon’s surface. Other Canadensys NISA cameras have been used for situational awareness on various defence and commercial missions in Earth orbit, as well as other international lunar missions, and over 25 Canadensys NISA cameras are manifested on various upcoming international lunar lander missions in the next 24 months.

The baseline camera is less than 5x5x4 cm, with a mass less than 135 g, including an integrated onboard powerful CPU that can compress images, and on-board memory that can store thousands of images, the Canadensys NISA cameras are ideal for exploration applications. High resolution images can be captured and stored in the onboard memory. The camera’s onboard computer can compress images for transmission or can even create small thumbnails that can be sent to Earth with minimal bandwidth, and allow ground controllers to choose which of the images should be downloaded in full resolution. A powerful scripting language also allows for highly automated operations.

The NISA camera family is available with a wide range of options, including color and monochrome imagers, thermal coatings for various regimes, and fields of view from over 180 degrees to less than 20 degrees though standard or customized lens solutions. Electronic scene stitching can provide true full spherical imaging in all directions around a spacecraft using fixed NISA cameras, without any moving components. Other options include stray-light reduction baffles and mounting systems. A star-tracker package can provide additional systems functionality to the cameras, especially on micro missions where mass is a premium. A high-resolution lunar-night-survivable pan-tilt-unit (PTU*) is also currently in development for planetary surface missions.

In short, whether you need a stock configuration, or one customized to fit your mission requirements, Canadensys has a NISA camera for you.

See below for some spectacular images taken by Canadensys NISA cameras. To explore the use of lunar flight-proven Canadensys NISA cameras for your upcoming mission, please contact info@canadensys.com.

* PTU development is undertaken with the financial support of the Canadian Space Agency