The PRISMA hyperspectral mission: Science activities and opportunities for agriculture and land monitoring

The main objectives of the PRISMA (Hyperspectral Precursor of the Application Mission) mission are: the implementation of an Earth Observation pre-operative payload, the in-orbit demonstration and qualification of an Italian state-of-the-art hyperspectral/panchromatic technology and the validation of end-to-end data processing system able to support the development of new applications based on high spectral resolution images. The aim of the paper is to provide an overview of the PRISMA mission by describing the current status of the program and giving a brief outline of the work done till now in the framework of the SAP4PRISMA project scientific studies in supporting the exploitation of the future PRISMA hyperspectral images for environmental applications.