NASA’s Ames Analysis Middle in Silicon Valley homes a novel laboratory: the Airborne Sensor Facility (ASF). The engineers on the ASF are chargeable for constructing, sustaining, and working quite a few devices that get deployed on analysis plane, however one in every 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 embody lasers, mirrors, and a lightweight supply known 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 photograph above, electrical engineer Nikolas Gibson performs calibration checks 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 by way of the infrared.
With regards to calibration, every of those channels features like a selected key on a piano and must be individually checked towards the “tuner.” By pointing the instrument’s sensor at a recognized 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 challenge. It was recalibrated earlier than heading again into the sphere for the Geological Earth Mapping Experiment, or GEMx, mission in late Might 2025, which is able to use the instrument to assist map important minerals throughout the southwestern United States.
