Specifications

FASTER
26
Very often, modified aircrafts that can be equipped with photogrammetric
instruments, are located in a limited number of airports and long transferring flights are
needed to reach the area of interest. It often happens that the flight time required for the
transfer equals that for the photogrammetric campaign. So if the instrument itself can be
moved, these long transfer flights can be avoided and the nearest available aircraft to the
operational area, can be used to perform the flight campaign reducing total costs.
Figure 26: Direct Georeferencing System, reference frames [Ref. (3)]
Another important aspect that must be taken into account is the size of the area that
has to be acquired. Large aircraft equipped with pushbroom line scanners are only
suitable for very large land areas and cannot be used for a few square kilometers, but
these are typical values for many applications like precision farming or coastal and urban
monitoring.
During the development of the FASTER system two main objectives were pursued:
the realization of a system which can be easily moved form an aircraft to another targeted
for image acquisition on small areas.