Preflight radiometric calibration of RazakSAT™

RazakSATtrade is Malaysia´s second earth observation satellite. The Medium-sized Aperture Camera (MAC) is the instrument payload to be flown on the RazakSATtrade. MAC operates on visible and near infrared wavelength (VNIR), including four multispectral bands from 450nm - 890nm and one panchromatic band from 510nm to 730nm. Its ground pixel resolution is 5m for multispectral bands and 2.5m for panchromatic band. At 685km nominal altitude, the image swath width for MAC is 20km. RazakSATtrade is scheduled to be launched into 9deg inclination Near-Equatorial Orbit (NEqO) on April 2009. It provides a high number of passes (14 times per day over Malaysia) for communication with ground station, and imaging opportunity increases by 3 times more compared to a sun-synchronous orbit. In order to give user quality assurance of the operational imagery, ground calibration (pre-flight calibration) has been conducted. This report outlines the techniques adopted during pre-flight calibration of the radiometric response of the MAC system. Results from system level measurement of the instrument response, namely the dark response, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), saturation radiance, dynamic range, characterization of individual detector, gain and linearity analysis for each spectral band are presented and discussed.