The need of atmospheric information with a higher spatial and temporal resolution drives the development of small satellites and satellite constellations to complement satellite flagship missions. Since optical systems are a main contributor to the satellite size, these are the prime candidate for their miniaturization. We present here a novel optical system where the complete spectrometer part of the optical system is compressed in one flat optical element. The element consists of an array of photonic crystals which is directly placed on a detector. The photonic crystals act as optical filters with a tunable spectral transmission response. From the integrated optical signals per filter and the atmosphere model, greenhouse gas concentrations are obtained using computational inversion. We present in this article the instrument concept, the manufacturing and measurement of the photonic crystals, methods for the filter array optimization, and discuss the predicted retrieval performance for the detection of methane and carbon dioxide.

An approach for designing purely refractive optical elements that generate engineered, multi-order-helix point spread functions (PSFs) with large peak separation for passive, optical depth measurement is presented. The influence of aberrations on the PSF’s rotation angle, which limits the depth retrieval accuracy, is studied numerically and analytically. It appears that only Zernike modes with an azimuthal index that is an integer multiple of the number of PSF peaks introduce PSF rotation, and hence a depth estimation errors. This implies that high-order-helix designs have superior robustness with respect to aberrations. This is experimentally demonstrated by imaging an extended scene in the presence of severe system aberrations using novel, cost-e cient phase elements based on UV-replication on the wafer-scale.

A system approach to acquire a three-dimensional object distribution is presented using a compact and cost efficient camera system with an engineered point spread function. The corresponding monocular setup incorporates a phase-only computer-generated hologram in combination with a conventional imaging objective in order to optically encode the axial information within a single two-dimensional image. The object's depth map is calculated using a novel approach based on the power cepstrum of the image. The in-plane RGB image information is restored with an extended depth of focus by applying an adaptedWiener filter. The presented approach is tested experimentally by estimating the three-dimensional distribution of an extended passively illuminated scene.