The Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER), which is a multiband pushbroom sensor suite onboard Terra, has successfully provided valuable multiband images for approximately 20 years since Terra’s launch in 1999. Since the launch, sensitivity degradations in ASTER’s visible and near infrared (VNIR) and thermal infrared (TIR) bands have been monitored and corrected with various calibration methods. However, a unignorable discrepancy between different calibration methods has been confirmed for the VNIR bands that should be assessed with another reliable calibration method. In April 2003 and August 2017, ASTER observed the Moon (and deepspace) for conducting a radiometric calibration (called as lunar calibration), which can measure the temporal variation in the sensor sensitivity of the VNIR bands enough accurately (better than 1%). From the lunar calibration, 3–6% sensitivity degradations were confirmed in the VNIR bands from 2003 to 2017. Since the measured degradations from the other methods showed different trends from the lunar calibration, the lunar calibration suggests a further improvement is needed for the VNIR calibration. Sensitivity degradations in the TIR bands were also confirmed by monitoring the variation in the number of saturated pixels, which were qualitatively consistent with the onboard and vicarious calibrations.

The ASTER is a high-resolution optical sensor for observing the Earth on the Terra satellite launched in December1999. The ASTER consists of three radiometers. The VNIR has three bands in the visible and near-infrared region, the SWIR has six bands in the shortwave infrared region, and the TIR has five bands in the thermal infrared region. The onboard calibration devices of the VNIR and SWIR were halogen lamps and photodiode monitors. In orbit three bands of the VNIR showed a rapid decrease in the output signal. The band 1, the shortest wavelength, decreased most to 70% in twelve years. The temperature of the onboard blackbody of the TIR is varied from 270 K to 340 K in the long term calibration for the offset and gain calibration. The long term calibration of the TIR showed a decrease in response after launch. The decrease was most remarkable at band 12 decreasing to 60% in eleven years. The degradation spectra of the TIR shows that the possible causes of the degradation might be silicone and hydrazine. ASTER onboard calibration is normally carried out once in 49 days but additional onboard calibrations were added just before and after the inclination adjustment maneuver (IAM) to check the effect on the RCC. This experiment was carried out three times for each IAM in the fiscal year 2011. The result showed that the change in the RCC was small for both VNIR and TIR.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract