The themes of this session are a) System design of small instruments for harsh environments on Earth and in Space - hardware and/or software, b) Development of data infrastructures for optimal access to observational data and c) Image processing developments for automatic analysis of large amounts of data. The intention of this session is to present and discuss different approaches for designing small autonomous instruments including embedded structures, means of making different kinds of data accessable to end users and tools for processing large quantities of data, especially images.

In the development phase of a technological system the development team has to decide what kind of control system would be used and how to write a software which supports the purpose of the task. In most cases the main effort focuses on the optimization of the detectors, while system engineering tasks, data dissemination and bulk processing are left for other groups at a later time. Optimizing the complete chain from system design to final data analysis can lead to significant savings in resources and efforts and may open new application areas.