Optical calibration of the SuperCam instrument body unit spectrometers

Carey Legett (1) , Raymond Newell (1) , Adriana Reyes-Newell (1) , Anthony Nelson (1) , Pernelle Bernardi (2) , Steven Bender (3) , Olivier Forni (4) , D Venhaus (1) , Samuel Clegg (1) , A Ollila (1) , Paolo Pilleri (4) , V Sridhar (5) , S Maurice (4) , Roger Wiens (1)

1 LANL - Los Alamos National Laboratory
2 LESIA - Laboratoire d'études spatiales et d'instrumentation en astrophysique = Laboratory of Space Studies and Instrumentation in Astrophysics
3 PSI - Planetary Science Institute [Tucson]
4 IRAP - Institut de recherche en astrophysique et planétologie
5 JPL - Jet Propulsion Laboratory

The SuperCam remote sensing instrument on NASA's Perseverance rover is capable of four spectroscopic techniques, remote micro-imaging, and audio recording. These analytical techniques provide details of the chemistry and mineralogy of the rocks and soils probed in the Jezero Crater on Mars. Here we present the methods used for optical calibration of the three spectrometers covering the 243-853 nm range used by three of the four spectroscopic techniques. We derive the instrument optical response, which characterizes the instrument sensitivity to incident radiation as a function of a wavelength. The instrument optical response function derived here is an essential step in the interpretation of the spectra returned by SuperCam as it converts the observed spectra, reported by the instrument as "digital counts" from an analog to digital converter, into physical values of spectral radiance.

Domaines: Physique [physics]; Sciences de l'ingénieur [physics]

Carey Legett, Raymond Newell, Adriana Reyes-Newell, Anthony Nelson, Pernelle Bernardi, et al.. Optical calibration of the SuperCam instrument body unit spectrometers. Applied optics, 2022, 61 (11), pp. 2967-2974. ⟨10.1364/ao.447680⟩. ⟨hal-03671596⟩