THE AEROSPACE IMAGING INTERFEROMETER ALISEO: FURTHER IMPROVEMENTS OF CALIBRATION METHODS AND ASSESSMENT OF INTERFEROMETER RESPONSE

ALISEO (Aerospace Leap-frog Imaging Stationary Interferometer for Earth Observation) belongs to the stationary interferometers representing a promising architecture for future Earth Observation (EO) sensors due to their simple optical layout. ALISEO has been selected by the Italian Space Agency as the principal payload for a new optical mission based on a micro-satellite (MIOsat). Payloads planned for MIOsat are an extensible telescope, a high-resolution panchromatic camera, a Mach-Zehnder MEMS interferometer, and ALISEO. MIOsat is expected to provide a platform with pointing capability for those advanced sensors. ALISEO operates in the common-path Sagnac configuration, and it does not employ any moving part to generate phase delay between the two rays. The sensor acquires the target images modulated by a pattern of autocorrelation functions: a fringe pattern that is fixed with respect to the instrument's field of view. The complete interferogram of each target location is retrieved introducing relative source-observer motion, which allows any image pixels to be observed under different phase delays. Recent laboratory measurements performed with ALISEO are described and discussed in this paper. In order to calibrate the optical path difference (OPD) of raw interferograms, a set of measurements have been carried out using a double planar diffuser system and several coloured He-Ne lasers. Standard reflectance tiles together doped with Holmium and Rare Earths have been used for validating the wavelength calibration of the instrument and proving the reliability of the reflectance retrieving procedure.