RAD9000: a high-performance spectral radiometer for EO calibration applications

The US Navy incorporates a series of spectral radiometers to calibrate it's inventory of IR test equipment. However, the Navy now has IR imagers of such high performance, especially staring FLIRs, that the current inventory of radiometers are inadequate to meet Test Accuracy Ratios of 4:1. As a result, the Navy started a development program to design a new spectral radiometer of such performance that a 4:1 TAR could again be achieved. This paper provides a discussion of the design and performance of the new radiometer developed by SBIR for the Navy, the RAD9000 MWIR/LWIR spectral radiometer. The RAD9000 system features an all-reflective optical system, internal and external thermal reference sources, a visible camera-based sighting/alignment capability, modular MWIR and LWIR detector/filter subassemblies, flexible control/display software, and a sophisticated graphical user interface (GUI). We present prototype performance data describing the instrument's thermal sensitivity, radiometric accuracy, spectral resolution, calibration, and other important parameters