The temperature of the SIRTF optical system has two significant effects: it determines the contribution of the telescope thermal emission to the photon shot noise seen by the detectors, and it determines the magnitude of the telescope emission that constitutes the radiometric baseline against which astronomical measurements are made. Changes in the system temperature therefore produce shifts in the radiometric baseline which can set the limit on the usable sensitivity of the system. We compare these two effects and explore some of their implications. We find that temperature gradients on the primary mirror are not likely to pose a serious problem if spatial chopping is employed.

Date Published: 1 May 1986
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 0589, Instrumentation for Optical Remote Sensing from Space, (1 May 1986); doi: 10.1117/12.951936

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 0589:
Instrumentation for Optical Remote Sensing from Space
John W. Lear; Andre Monfils; Sidney L. Russak; John S. Seeley, Editor(s)