A CLOUD IMAGER FOR THE ESA EARTH RADIATION EXPLORER MISSION
- Paper ID
IAF-97-B.3.06
- author
- company
Alenia Difesa - Un’azienda Finmeccanica - Divisione Sistemi Avionici
- country
Italy
- year
1997
- abstract
The Cloud Imager is a candidate instrument for the Earth Radiation Mission of the European Space Agency. Under ESA EOPP contract, Officine Galileo studied a concept for a dedicated cloud imager, designed to meet the specific requirements of the mission. This instrument provides images in the Visible and Near infrared (VIS 0.65 pm and NIR 0.85pm), Short Wavelength infrared (SWIR 1.6 pm) and Thermal infrared (TIR 8.7 pm and 11 pm). A pushbroom technique is used to get strip images from an altitude of 500 Km with a swath width of about 300 Km and spatial resolution of 600 m at nadir. The collecting optics consists in three refractive lenses, optimized for different wavelength ranges focusing the beams onto three different detectors: two lines of a CCD area array are used for VIS and NIR bands, an InGaAs array for SWIR and two lines of a CMT array for TIR. A cryocooler is used to allow the TIR detector to operate at temperature of 65 K. The main feature of this design is the high versatility and compactness that represents a major step forward in definition of a mission which should employs a medium-size satellite.