Preliminary Calibration of PARC Hyperspectral Imager for NASA Planetary Lander Missions

Wavelength offset and instrument spectral response will be calibrated using helium spectral calibration lamp and a calibrated halogen lamp coupled to a monochromator, respectively. We will develop a signal processing pipeline to remedy spectral artifacts and increase out-of-band rejection by attempting to correct for phase errors in the measured interferogram, and by properly applying apodization prior to Fourier transformation. We will extract spectra from ALCHERA images of mineralogical samples and compare against laboratory spectra of the same samples.

Instrument response, stability, and spectral performance of the Palo Alto Research Center's (PARC) Actuation of Liquid Crystal for Hyperspectral Remote Analysis (ALCHERA) hyperspectral imager are not well characterized. Conventional multispectral imagers have significant limitations in optical throughput (~1 % – 3 %), optical bandwidth, minimum size, and dynamic configurability. We will perform an instrument response calibration of the ALCHERA to characterize its spectral performance and to eliminate instrument-related artifacts.

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