A Panchromatic Imaging Fourier Transform Spectrometer for the NASA Geostationary Coastal and Air Pollution Events Mission
This paper summarizes the design and development of the Panchromatic Imaging Fourier Transform Spectrometer (PanFTS) for the NASA Geostationary Coastal and Air Pollution Events (GEO-CAPE) Mission. The PanFTS instrument will advance the understanding of the global climate and atmospheric chemistry by measuring spectrally resolved outgoing thermal and reflected solar radiation. With continuous spectral coverage from the near-ultraviolet through the thermal infrared, this instrument is designed to measure pollutants, greenhouse gases, and aerosols as called for by the U.S. National Research Council Decadal Survey; Earth Science and Applications from Space: National Imperatives for the Next Decade and Beyond1. The PanFTS instrument is a hybrid instrument based on spectrometers like the Tropospheric Emissions Spectrometer (TES) that measures thermal emission, and those like the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), and the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) that measure scattered solar radiation. Simultaneous measurements over the broad spectral range from IR to UV is accomplished by a two sided interferometer with separate optical trains and detectors for the ultraviolet-visible and infrared spectral domains. This allows each side of the instrument to be independently optimized for its respective spectral domain. The overall interferometer design is compact because the two sides share a single high precision cryogenic optical path difference mechanism (OPDM) and metrology laser as well as a number of other instrument systems including the line-of-sight pointing mirror, the data management system, thermal control system, electrical system, and the mechanical structure. The PanFTS breadboard instrument has been tested in the laboratory and demonstrated the basic functionality for simultaneous measurements in the visible and infrared. It is set to begin operations in the field at the California Laboratory for Atmospheric Remote Sensing (CLARS) observatory on Mt. Wilson measuring the atmospheric chemistry across the Los Angeles basin. Development has begun on a flight size PanFTS engineering model (EM) that addresses all critical scaling issues and demonstrates operation over the full spectral range of the flight instrument which will show the PanFTS instrument design is mature.