Caiman Imager

The Caiman Imager is a CubeSat-class multispectral pushbroom imaging sensor developed by Dragonfly Aerospace. It occupies a 3U form factor (100 x 100 x 250 mm), weighs 1.4 kg, and draws 10 W. The instrument is optimised for integration into 6U CubeSat buses.

At 500 km orbital altitude the Caiman delivers 3.25 m ground sample distance in panchromatic mode and 6.5 m in 11-band multispectral mode. Ground swath is 13 km. The sensor supports RGB and 11-band multispectral configurations with 12-bit digitisation.

Operator and third-party sources list the physical size as 3U (100 x 100 x 250 mm); a separate SatCatalog entry lists 16U, but that value conflicts with the documented dimensions and is not used here.^[1]

Spectral range in nanometres for the 11 multispectral bands has not been published in accessible sources as of 2026-05-28; dragonflyaerospace.com returned access errors at research time. Per-band centre wavelengths are not available in public documentation. The instrument operates in the VNIR portion of the spectrum based on its optical design class.

Flight heritage is noted for 2023 in third-party catalogue records. ^[1] No specific mission has been publicly identified for this heritage event as of the research date.

The Caiman represents the highest-resolution entry in the Dragonfly Aerospace CubeSat imager family, targeting 6U platform integrators requiring metre-class multispectral imaging capability.