A detailed description is given of an internally irradiated integrating sphere which supplies the radiance necessary for prelaunch calibration of the optical sensors mounted on the Japanese Earth Resources Satellite. The sphere is 1 m in diameter and has an aperture of 280 mm over which uniform radiance is expected. The sphere has 12 halogen lamps of 500 W operated at 100 V dc, giving the optical sensors nearly maximum spectral radiance for each spectral band from the earth's surface. Nonuniformity of the spectral radiance over the aperture is very small, enabling all the elements of each band to be simultaneously calibrated. A double-grating spectrometer is used to calibrate the integrating sphere against transfer standards.

Date Published: 1 August 1991
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 1493, Calibration of Passive Remote Observing Optical and Microwave Instrumentation, (1 August 1991); doi: 10.1117/12.46684

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 1493:
Calibration of Passive Remote Observing Optical and Microwave Instrumentation
Bruce W. Guenther, Editor(s)