The performance of an infrared space surveillance system is ultimately limited by the celestial background. The impact which the various components of this background have on the system is presented, as is the requirement for an accurate scene description capability for system design trade-off and performance analyses. The Geophysics Laboratory, partially through contract to Mission Research Corp., is creating a Celestial Background Scene Descriptor to meet this need. The development path for this description capability and its current status is presented. A low resolution, image-based descriptor will be available shortly, as will models of the point source and diffuse zodiacal backgrounds. Procedures are discussed which will extend this preliminary descriptor to higher resolutions, lower limiting brightnesses, and a broader spectral capability.

Date Published: 20 September 1989
PDF: 11 pages
Proc. SPIE 1110, Imaging Infrared: Scene Simulation, Modeling, and Real Image Tracking, (20 September 1989); doi: 10.1117/12.960734

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 1110:
Imaging Infrared: Scene Simulation, Modeling, and Real Image Tracking
August J. Huber; Milton J. Triplett; James R. Wolverton, Editor(s)