Introducing ABI North South Scans for Post-Launch Validation

The GOES-R series of imager, Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI), ushers in a new generation of technological advancements with increased spectral, spatial, and temporal performance compared to the heritage GOES imagers.  To achieve its enhanced performance requirements one fundamental design change was a significant increase in the number of detectors per channel resulting in large Focal Plane Arrays (FPA) compared to the heritage GOES instruments.  The increase in FPA size enables a decrease in scan rate which improves signal-to-noise and increases the spatial (ABI swath width ~500 km) and temporal coverage (capable of collecting a full hemisphere every 5 min).  As a result, new post-launch validation challenges are introduced for the GOES-R series of imagers due to the large number of detectors per channel.  These challenges have been addressed in the pushbroom sensing Low Earth Orbit (LEO) community by conducting a 90 deg yaw maneuver of the spacecraft to enable all detectors to collect over the same effective target area, referred to as side-slither maneuver (SSM), providing an ideal method of on-orbit relative calibration or flat fielding.  If the target area radiance is known then this methodology could be utilized as a vicarious absolute radiometric calibration event.  ABI can acquire collections equivalent to the LEO SSM collections without the need of a spacecraft maneuver using its two scan mirrors, referred to as an ABI North South Scan (NSS).   An overview & technical description of ABI NSSs, their planned use -- both as part of post-launch testing and focused high-altitude aircraft field campaign validation efforts -- will be discussed, as well as, preliminary modeling & simulation efforts to characterize the expected performance of ABI NSS collections of ideal Earth validation targets.  This unique capability offered by the GOES-R series of imagers provides a new methodology to meet the performance validation challenges of these large FPA next generation systems.