Ghosting and stray-light performance assessment of the Landsat Data Continuity Mission's (LDCM) Operational Land Imager (OLI)

The newly launched Operational Land Imager (OLI) aboard the LDCM satellite has stringent prescription on the levels of ghosting and diffuse stray-light in the reflective bands in order to preserve the mission radiometric requirements. The LDCM project science team and instrument teams wrote the requirements such that they were image based, inclusive of all effects that appear to be ghosts or stray-light, and consequently more directly testable. The OLI Instrument Developer, Ball Aerospace Technology Corporation (BATC), working closely with experts from aerospace, academia, and the NASA/USGS LDCM project were able to identify and mitigate the various contributors to ghosting and stray-light, resulting in outstanding imagery for the wide field-of-view push-broom imaging sensor. We will describe the ghosting and stray-light requirements and some of the contributing effects such as the leaky pixels that were seen on the EO-1/ALI. We will also highlight some of the technical challenges encountered and the solutions resulting in the substantial reduction of ghosting and stray-light which were verified by ground test. We will compare these ground measurements and analytic predictions with Lunar scan data to, potentially, resolve the question of whether the source of some of the performance outliers was the instrument or the test equipment.