The heart of MUSES9-HS hyperspectral imager is an electro-optic tunable filter module, which automatically selects and tunes the imaging central wavelength. The tunable filter is synchronized with the imaging sensor module, so that several narrow-band images are captured during a spectral scanning.

In the image domain, the data set includes a full image at each individual wavelength. In the spectroscopy domain, a fully resolved spectrum at each individual pixel is recorded. The nature of imagery data is typically multidimensional, spanning spatial and spectral dimensions (x, y, λ).