Design, manufacture, and calibration of infrared radiometric blackbody sources

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Abstract
A radiometric calibration station (RCS) is being assembled at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) which will allow for calibration of sensors with detector arrays having spectral capability from about 0.4-15 micrometers. The configuration of the LANL RCS is shown. Two blackbody sources have been designed to cover the spectral range from about 3-15 micrometers, operating at temperatures ranging from about 180-350 K within a vacuum environment. The sources are designed to present a uniform spectral radiance over a large area to the sensor unit under test. THe thermal uniformity requirement of the blackbody cavities has been one of the key factors of the design, requiring less than 50 mK variation over the entire blackbody surface to attain effective emissivity values of about 0.999. Once the two units are built and verified to the level of about 100 mK at LANL, they will be sent to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where at least a factor of two improvements will be calibrated into the blackbody control system. The physical size of these assemblies will require modifications of the existing NIST Low Background Infrared (LBIR) Facility. LANL has constructed a bolt-on addition to the LBIR facility that will allow calibration of our large aperture sources. Methodology for attaining the two blackbody sources at calibration levels of performance equivalent to present state of the art will be explained in the paper.© (1996) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.

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