The design and performance of the focal plane assembly for the Geostationary Earth Radiation Budget (GERB) instrument

The design and performance of a focal plane assembly consisting of a linear detector and ASICs is reported here. The detector consists of 256 thermoelectric micromachined pixels which have a gold black coating to obtain the spectral response over the wavelength range 0.3–30 μm. A description of the detector and the ASICs is given along with their performance in terms of noise, spectral response and linearity. Three focal plane arrays have been built for three GERB instruments, the first of which is flown on the first Meteosat Second Generation (MSG-1) satellite, launched in August 2002.