Monitoring of COMS MI visible channel degradation based on Moon observations

Most of the current space-borne visible imagers on a geosynchronous orbit (GEO), which do not have onboard calibration devices, use a vicarious calibration. For a meteorological payload on a GEO satellite, lunar calibration is often used. The meteorological imager (MI) on the communication, ocean, and meteorological satellite (COMS) has been successfully operated for half of its entire mission lifetime (∼7 years). The visible channel of the MI uses the lunar cal- ibration to monitor its degradation. The degradation rate of the instrument was monitored using the ratio between the calculated radiance of the Moon from the Robotic Lunar Observatory (ROLO) model and the observed radiance from the MI. Analyses of the 42-month Moon image data showed that the instrument's mean degradation rate was about 1.88%. These values confirmed the outstanding performance of the COMS MI visible channel compared with that of the GOES-10 imager. © The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI. (DOI: 10.1117/1.JRS.8.083518)