Teledyne Brown Engineering (TBE) located in Huntsville, Alabama, USA, and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), Germany, operate the imaging spectrometer DESIS that is integrated in the Multi-User-System for Earth Sensing (MUSES) platform installed on the International Space Station (ISS).

DESIS quantifies solar irradiance reflected from the Earth surface as a response to their specific condition. DESIS measurements greatly advance our ability to characterize vegetation health and stress, water quality and pollution as well as the Earth mineral resources. Thus, it supports the management of agricultural and forest ecosystems, it helps to monitor the biodiversity of our planet and it greatly enhances our understanding of important carbon and water cycling processes.

The DESIS is realized as a pushbroom imaging spectrometer spectrally sensitive over the visible and near-infrared wavelength range from 400 to 1000 nm.  The optical design is based on the Offner-type grating spectrometer widely used in imaging spectrometer designs. The Ground Sampling Distance (GSD) at nadir view depends on the flight altitude of the ISS and is about 30 m resulting in a swath width of about 30 km.