The Performance Of The Flight Detector System For The Gerb Instrument

The construction and testing of the detector system for the Geostationary Earth Radiation Budget (GERB) instrument has proved to be technically challenging in a number of areas. The detector system consists of an uncooled linear array of 256 thermoelectric pixels with 4 Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) to perform front end analogue signal processing, A/D conversion and multiplexing, The design of the detector and of the ASICs represents considerable development effort to meet, in particular, requirements of low noise and broad band spectral response and the designs have been presented in previous papers. The assembly and integration of the components into a suitably packaged flight focal plane assembly (FPA) has also been challenging, requiring a solution which would allow for individual testing of components before commitment to assembly into the focal plane package. Having assembled and qualified several detector systems, the characterisation and performance of the flight detector system is presented in this paper.