NASA’s Ames Analysis Heart in Silicon Valley homes a singular laboratory: the Airborne Sensor Facility (ASF). The engineers on the ASF are accountable for constructing, sustaining, and working quite a few devices that get deployed on analysis plane, however certainly one of their most necessary roles is instrument calibration.
Consider calibration like tuning a piano between performances: A musician makes use of a tuner to set the usual pitch for every string, making certain that the piano stays on pitch for each live performance.
The “tuners” at ASF embrace lasers, mirrors, and a light-weight supply referred to as an integrating sphere – a hole sphere about 36 inches in diameter that emits a set quantity of sunshine from a gap within the high. By checking an instrument towards this baseline between every mission, engineers be sure that the instrument sensors present correct, dependable information each time.
Within the picture above, electrical engineer Nikolas Gibson performs calibration exams on the MODIS/ASTER Airborne Simulator (MASTER) spectrometer, co-developed by NASA Ames and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
A spectrometer separates mild into particular person wavelengths, offering researchers with details about the properties of no matter is creating or interacting with that mild. The MASTER instrument measures about 50 particular person spectral channels, offering information on wavelengths from the seen spectrum via the infrared.
In relation to calibration, every of those channels capabilities like a particular key on a piano and must be individually checked towards the “tuner.” By pointing the instrument’s sensor at a identified amount of sunshine coming from the integrating sphere, the crew checks the accuracy of MASTER’s information output and repairs or adjusts the sensor as wanted.
On this picture, MASTER had returned from an April 2025 scientific marketing campaign observing prescribed fires in Alabama and Georgia with NASA’s FireSense mission. It was recalibrated earlier than heading again into the sector for the Geological Earth Mapping Experiment, or GEMx, mission in late Could 2025, which can use the instrument to assist map essential minerals throughout the southwestern United States.