Pre-Launch Spectral Calibration of the Absorbed Aerosol Sensor

Spectral calibration consists of the calibration of wavelengths and the measurement of the instrument’s spectral response function (SRF). Unlike conventional slits, the absorbed aerosol sensors (AAS) are used as a slit homogenizer, in which the SRF is not a conventional Gaussian curve. To be more precise, the SRF is the convolution of the slit function of the spectrometer, the line spread function of the optical system, and the detector response function. The SRF of the slit homogenizer is a flat-topped multi-Gaussian function. Considering the convenience of fitting, a super-Gaussian function, which has a distribution similar to the flat-topped multi-Gaussian function, is employed to fit the measured data in a spectral calibration. According to the results, the SRF’s shapes resembling a Gaussian curve with a flat top could be derived, which contains a full width at half maximum (FWHM) of 1.78–1.82 nm for the AAS. The results show that the correlation is about 0.99, which indicates the usefulness of the fitting function that could better characterize the SRF of the instrument.