CONTAMINATION EXPERIMENTS IN THE MIDCOURSE SPACE EXPERIMENT

The midcourse space experiment satellite is a space-based sensor platf orm designed to collect earth and atmospheric remote sensing and astro nomy data in support of ballistic missile defense and civilian science objectives. Because of the potential adverse effects of contamination on the main optical sensors, the satellite contains a suite of contam ination-monitoring instruments designed to completely characterize the source, generation, and mechanisms of contamination of space optics a nd to validate preflight contamination models. Descriptions of these c ontamination instruments, their calibration and testing, and the groun d test data collected are presented. The sensitivity to contamination of the main optical sensors, which are imagers and interferometers in the infrared, visible, and ultraviolet spectral regions, are also disc ussed.