The Compact Visible and Infrared Radiometer (COVIR) for Earth and climate monitoring

The Compact Visible and Infrared Radiometer (COVIR) is an imaging system being developed at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center for use in earth and climate monitoring. The goals of this effort are to develop an imager that satisfies the radiometric demands of typical infrared and visible earth observations while providing a compact and low-cost instrument for small satellite missions. The infrared camera of COVIR is built around an uncooled microbolometer array detector whereas the visible camera is built around a CCD linear detector array. Together these two cameras provide calibrated imagery of clouds, land, and sea at infrared wavelengths of 10.8 μm, 12.0 μm, and 3.7 μm along with visible wavelengths of 870 nm, 670 nm, 550 nm, and 440 nm and stereoscopic retrieval of cloud height. COVIR is being developed as part of the NASA Instrument Incubator Program (IIP) as an engineering model. The goal of the IIP is to develop laboratory prototype instruments that can be rapidly upgraded to meet flight standards and integrated into a spacecraft. The target spacecraft for the COVIR instrument is a sun synchronous, polar orbiting earth satellite at a nominal altitude of 600 km. This paper provides a description of the COVIR instrument, its operation, and performance