Calibration and Performance Verification of Hyperspectral Systems

Abstract

German Aerospace Center DLR is involved in sev- eral hyperspectral missions for Earth remote sensing but also for deep space missions (e.g. the Mercury mission Bepi Colombo). Hyperspectral instruments are designed for detection of changes on planetary surfaces, oceans and the atmosphere. These spectrometer work in the visible (VIS), near infrared (NIR), short wave infrared (SWIR) up to thermal infrared (TIR) spectral range with a spectral sampling distance below 10nm in the VIS / SWIR region. In the spatial domain the instrument has 500 up to 1000 pixels with a Ground Sampling Distance (GSD) of about 30m up to 90m. The paper describes the calibration and performance verification pro- cedures for different focal planes (FP) and instrumnts. These procedures include measurements of the dark signal (DS), the linearity and deviation from linearity, noise behavior, SNR and and Photon Transfer Function (PTF), the absolute radiometric calibration (QE determination), the geometrical imaging performance by using the modulation transfer function (MTF) and the spectral resolution of the different spectral channels.