Air-LUSI makes highly-accurate, SI-traceable measurements of lunar spectral irradiance.  These measurements can be used to validate or adjust current models of lunar spectral irradiance used for calibration Earth observing satellites.  Air-LUSI is initially being used to address the current 5-10% uncertainty in knowledge of exo-atmospheric spectral lunar irradiance. Improved lunar spectral irradiance model accuracy will help satellite instruments to use the Moon as an absolute calibration reference, greatly improving the versitility and speed of on-orbit satellite calibration.  Air-LUSI has two main subsystems:

• IRIS - IRradiance Instrument Subsystem is a non-imaging telescope with an integrating sphere feeding light via fiber optics to a spectrometer.
• ARTEMIS - Autonomous, Robotic TElescope Mount Instrument Subsystem keeps telescope fixed on the Moon to within less than 0.1°.  This system uses a tracking camera on the telescope and control computer.

We are targeting lunar phases withing 5° to 90° of the Full Moon.  Air-LUSI measurements lunar spectral irradiance with spectral resolution of 3.7 nm with 0.8 nm sampling from 300 nm to 1100 nm, with accuracy target of better than 1% (k=1).  Future system performance will include measurements out to 2500 nm with ≤ 10 nm resolution.  Demonstration flights with the Air-LUSI provided an unprecedented sub-percent level of accuracy <0.8% (k=1) relative uncertainty from 400 nm to 950 nm.  Future measurement accuracy is expected to be <0.5% (k=1).

SPEC has developed a Fast Cloud Droplet Probe (FCDP) with state-of-the-art electro-optics and electronics that utilizes forward scattering to determine cloud droplet distributions and concentrations in the range of 1.5 to 50 microns.  Though designed for cloud droplet measurements, the probe has also shown reliable measurements in ice clouds.  The new electronics include a temperature controlled fiber-coupled laser, FSSP-300 optics with pinhole limiting depth of field (Lance et al. 2010), a field programmable gate array (FPGA), 40 MHz analog-to-digital-converter (ADC) sampling, custom amplifiers, a very small and low power Linux based 400 MHz processor and a 16-Gigabyte flash drive that stores data at the probe.

The NASA GSFC Compact Airborne NO2 Experiment (CANOE) instrument measures nitrogen dioxide (NO2) on both pressurized and unpressurized (high-altitude) aircraft. Using non-resonant laser induced fluorescence (LIF), CANOE possesses the high sensitivity, fast time response, and dynamic range needed to observe NO2 throughout the troposphere and lower stratosphere.