Abstract:
The third major reprocessing campaign for the Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 mission is underway. With each release, several aspects of instrument calibration were improved. An onboard lamp tracks relative gain degradation, but ages too quickly to track absolute scaling. The most significant changes between builds were evolving assumptions about the stability of the solar calibrator. For the newest build, the trend in lunar measurements over a 4.5-year time series was applied. Another significant change was to expand a list of detector outliers via review of dark, lamp, and science measurements. More subtle adjustments to stray light and spectral dispersion were also performed. The techniques developed for OCO-2 are being applied to the Orbiting Carbon Observatory 3, which completed in-orbit checkout in August 2019. OCO-3 does not have a solar calibrator, and will need to constrain lamp aging via secondary lamps and comparison to other satellites.
