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| The CALIPSO payload consists of three co-aligned nadir-viewing instruments; the Cloud-Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP), the Imaging Infrared Radiometer (IIR), and the Wide Field Camera (WFC).
These instruments are designed to operate autonomously and continuously, although the WFC acquires data only under daylight conditions. Science Data are downlinked using an X-band transmitter system which is part of the payload.
The physical layout of the payload is shown above.
CALIOP is a two-wavelength polarization-sensitive lidar that provides high-resolution vertical profiles of aerosols and clouds.
CALIOP utilizes three receiver channels: one measuring the 1064 nm backscatter intensity and two channels measuring orthogonally polarized components of the 532 nm backscattered signal. Dual 14-bit digitizers on each channel provide an effective 22-bit dynamic range. The receiver telescope is 1 meter in diameter. A redundant laser transmitter is included in the payload.
An active boresight system is employed to maintain co-alignment between the transmitter and the receiver. Ball Aerospace, Corp , developed the instrument.
The WFC is a modified version of the commercial off-the-shelf Ball Aerosopace CT-633 star tracker camera. It is a fixed, nadir-viewing imager with a single spectral channel covering the 620-270 nm region, selected to match band 1 of the MODIS (MODerate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) instrument on Aqua.
A three-channel IIR is provided by CNES with algorithm development performed by the Institute Pierre Simon Laplace (IPSL) in Paris.
The IIR a nadir-viewing, non-scanning imager having a 64 km by 64 km swath with a pixel size of 1 km. The CALIOP beam is nominally aligned with the center of the IIR image.
The instrument uses a single microbolometer detecter array, with a rotating filter wheel providing measurements at three channels in the thermal infrared window region at 8.7 mm, 10.5 mm, and 12.0 mm. These wavelengths were selected to optimize joint CALIOP/IIR retrievals of cirrus cloud emissivity and particle size.
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the CALIPSO payload, visit:
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