THE IR DETECTOR SYSTEM FOR THE GERB INSTRUMENT

The Geostationary Earth Radiation Budget (GERB) instrument is an Earth observing scientific payload launched on-board the European Space Agency Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) satellite in September 2002. The instrument measures reflected and emitted radiation in two wavebands, 0.3 - 4 µm and 4 - 30 µm. The detector system comprises the focal plane and supporting front-end electronics. The focal plane consists of a 256-element thermoelectric linear array operating at ~300 K and four application specific integrated circuits (ASIC) providing parallel amplification, filtering and digitisation. The front-end electronics are built around a digital signal processor, which performs integration and additional filtering of the ASIC product. This paper describes in detail the design, operation and performance of the GERB detector system.