Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera Narrow Angle Cameras: Laboratory and Initial Flight Calibration

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) has two identical Narrow Angle Cameras (NACs). Each NAC is a monochrome pushbroom scanner, providing images with a pixel scale of 50 cm from a 50-km orbit. A single NAC image has a swath width of 2.5 km and a length of up to 26 km. The NACs are mounted to acquire side-by-side imaging for a combined swath width of 5 km. The NAC is designed to fully characterize future human and robotic landing sites in terms of scientific and resource merit, trafficability, and hazards. The North and South poles will be mapped at 1-meter-scale poleward of 85.5 degrees latitude. Stereo coverage is achieved by pointing the NACs off-nadir, which requires planning in advance. Read noise is 91 and 93 e- and the full well capacity is 334,000 and 352,000 e- for NAC-L and NAC-R respectively. Signal-to-noise ranges from 42 for low-reflectance material with 70 degree illumination to 230 for high-reflectance material with 0 degree illumination. Longer exposure times and 2x binning are available to further increase signal-to-noise with loss of spatial resolution. Lossy data compression from 12 bits to 8 bits uses a companding table selected from a set optimized for different signal levels. A model of focal plane temperatures based on flight data is used to command dark levels for individual images, optimizing the performance of the companding tables and providing good matching of the NAC-L and NAC-R images even before calibration. The preliminary NAC calibration pipeline includes a correction for nonlinearity at low signal levels with an offset applied for DN>600 and a logistic function for DN<600. Flight images taken on the limb of the Moon provide a measure of stray light performance. Averages over many lines of images provide a measure of flat field performance in flight. These are comparable with laboratory data taken with a diffusely reflecting uniform panel.