Background
In 1704, Sir Isaac Newton published in his ‘Treatise of Light’ (Newton, 1704) the concept of dispersion of light. He demonstrated that white light could be split up into component colours by means of a prism, and found that each pure colour is characterized by a specific refrangibility. The corpuscular theory by Newton was gradually succeeded over time by the wave theory. Consequently, the substantial summary of past experiences performed by Maxwell (1873), resulted in his equations of electromagnetic waves. But it was not until the 19th century that the quantitative measurement of dispersed light was recognized and standardized.
A major contribution was Fraunhofer's discovery of the dark lines in the solar spectrum (Fraunhofer, 1817); and their interpretation as absorption lines on the basis of experiments by Bunsen and Kirchhoff (1863). The term "spectroscopy" was first used in the late 19th century and provides the empirical foundations for atomic and molecular physics (Born & Wolf, 1999). Significant achievements in imaging spectroscopy are attributed to airborne instruments, particularly arising in the early 1980s and 1990s (Goetz et al., 1985; Vane et al., 1984). However, it was not until 1999 that the first imaging spectrometer was launched in space (the NASA Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS).
Terminology and definitions evolve over time. At one time, >10 spectral bands sufficed to justify the term "imaging spectrometer" but presently the term is seldom defined by a total minimum number of spectral bands, rather by a contiguous (or redundant) statement of spectral bands.
The term hyperspectral imaging is sometimes used interchangeably with imaging spectroscopy. Due to its heavy use in military related applications, the civil world has established a slight preference for using the term imaging spectroscopy.
Read more about this topic: Imaging Spectroscopy
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