Calibration and performance of the Galileo solid-state imaging system in Jupiter orbit
Abstract
The solid-state imaging subsystem (SSI) on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA's) Galileo Jupiter orbiter spacecraft has successfully completed its 2-yr primary mission exploring the Jovian system. The SSI has remained in remarkably stable calibration during the 8-yr flight, and the quality of the returned images is exceptional. Absolute spectral radiometric calibration has been determined to 4 to 6% across its eight spectral filters. Software and calibration files are available to enable radiometric, geometric, modulation transfer function (MTF), and scattered light image calibration. The charge-coupled device (CCD) detector endured the harsh radiation environment at Jupiter without significant damage and exhibited transient image noise effects at about the expected levels. A lossy integer cosine transform (ICT) data compressor proved essential to achieving the SSI science objectives given the low data transmission rate available from Jupiter due to a communication antenna failure. The ICT compressor does introduce certain artifacts in the images that must be controlled to acceptable levels by judicious choice of compression control parameter settings. The SSI team's expertise in using the compressor improved throughout the orbital operations phase and, coupled with a strategy using multiple playback passes of the spacecraft tape recorder, resulted in the successful return of 1645 unique images of Jupiter and its satellites.
Additional Information
© 1999 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers. Paper 980345 received Sep. 8, 1998; revised manuscript received Dec. 14, 1998; accepted for publication Jan. 20, 1999. The success of the Galileo orbital mission is due to the many individual contributions of the flight team and the Deep Space Network under the leadership of W. O'Neil, N. Ausman, R. Mitchell, and T. Johnson. T. Jones planned the SSI observations and playback sequences for the C3 and G7 orbits. Credit goes to the analysts of the JPL Multimission Image Processing Laboratory, including C. Stanley, T. Pauro, A. Culver, D. Jensen, and J. Yoshimizu, for reconstructing and processing the SSI images. A portion of the work described herein was performed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.Attached Files
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 70894
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20161005-152820327
- NASA/JPL/Caltech
- Created
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2016-10-14Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-11Created from EPrint's last_modified field