Radiative transfer analysis for Amon-Ra instrument

  • Published : 2009.10.15

Abstract

The 'Amon-Ra' instrument of the proposed 'EARTHSHINE' satellite is a dual (i.e. imaging and energy) channel instrument for monitoring the total solar irradiance (TSI) and the Earth's irradiance at around the L1 halo orbit. Earlier studies for this instrument include, but not limited to, design and construction of breadboard Amon-Ra imaging channel, stray light suppression and system performance computation using Integrated Ray Tracing (IRT) technique. The Amon-Ra instrument is required to produce 0.3% in uncertainty for both Sunlight and Earthlight measurement. In this study, we report accurate estimation of the output electric signal derived from the orbital variation of radiant exitance from the Sun and the Earth arriving at the aperture and detector plane of the Amon-Ra. For this, orbital irradiance are computed analytically first and then confirmed by simulation using Integrated Ray Tracing (IRT) model. Specially, the results show the arriving power at the bolometer detector surface is $1.24{\mu}W$ for the Sunlight and $1.28{\mu}W$ for the Earthlight, producing the output signal pulses of 34.31 mV and 35.47 mV respectively. These results demonstrate successfully that the arriving radiative power is well within the bolometer detector dynamic range and, therefore, the proposed detector can be used for the in-orbit measurement sequence. We discuss the computational details and implications as well as the simulation results.

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