New software tool opens access to spacecraft camera design
by Sophie Jenkins
London, UK (SPX) Sep 22, 2025

A newly developed open-source software package promises to make advanced spacecraft camera modelling accessible to a much wider research community. The tool, known as SIMply, can replicate how light interacts with lenses, sensors, and surfaces to predict the performance of imaging systems in space before they are built.

Created by Dr George Brydon of the University of Glasgow, SIMply is available as a free download from GitHub. It employs ray-tracing and physical modelling techniques to simulate everything from sensor noise to lens projections, including pinhole, fisheye, and panoramic systems. The software aims to provide universities, small companies, and individual researchers with capabilities that were once restricted to large corporations with proprietary tools.

To validate SIMply, Dr Brydon compared simulated imagery with spacecraft photographs of the Moon, the asteroid Itokawa, and comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. By using detailed 3D data from past missions, he demonstrated that the software could generate images nearly indistinguishable from the originals, replicating brightness, surface reflectivity, and topographic details with remarkable precision.

One test recreated a 2007 Rosetta mission image of the Moon, showing how SIMply captured the interplay of surface features and camera sensor response at high fidelity. Dr Brydon emphasised that such simulation can save costs by reducing the need for early-stage hardware development.

"The early stages of SIMply's development began during my PhD, when I realised that there were no freely-available tools to help me model novel spacecraft cameras," he said. "Large companies working on camera development have access to a wide range of powerful tools because they have the resources to make their own software, but those tools remain private and inaccessible to other researchers."

He added: "My objective in fully developing SIMply using the Python programming language was to make a tool that's widely accessible to researchers in the planetary science and spacecraft design field. It's available for free use to everyone from university students all the way to engineers at SMEs with great ideas who otherwise don't have access to the resources needed to fully model their potential in software."

Although the paper focuses on planetary imaging, Brydon sees applications well beyond spaceflight. He believes SIMply could advance camera development for self-driving cars, sports tracking systems, and computer vision research. Ongoing work is adding new camera models, expanded capabilities, and improved documentation to support adoption. Current collaborations at Glasgow combine planetary geology with camera modelling to pioneer new imaging techniques for surface science.

Research Report:Image Simulation for Camera Development - Python Image Simulator for Planetary Exploration (SIMply)'

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