The significance of line-of-sight errors on imaging radiometers

The imaging radiometer platform´s angular instability reduces the image quality by distorting the scan path and by varying the radiometer beam incidence and tilt angles. The paper introduces a scan simulation based study, which quantifies the effects of the platform´s angular instability on the resulting image´s quality. The results indicate that the mean pointing error should be <0.1-0.2×3 dB beamwidths in the active/no stabilized case, but may be up to 2 beamwidths in the passive stabilization case without any large reduction in image quality