AIRS is a key facility instrument in the NASA Earth Observing System (EOS) program, a spaceborne, global observation system being implemented to obtain comprehensive long-term measurements of earth processes affecting global change. Designed to provide new and more accurate data about the atmosphere, land, and oceans for application in climate studies and weather prediction, AIRS performs passive IR remote sensing using a high resolution grating spectrometer with a wide spectral coverage focal plane assembly (FPA) operating at 58 K in a unique vacuum dewar package cooled to 155 K. The hybrid HgCdTe focal plane consists of 12 modules, 10 photovoltaic (PV) utilizing silicon readout integrated circuits (ROICs) in both direct and indirect hybrid configurations, and 2 photoconductive (PC) led out to warm electronics. This complex focal plane has a large optical footprint, 53 mm X 66 mm, and receives energy dispersed from the grating through a precision filter assembly containing 17 narrowband filters. Designed to prevent any interaction between the PV and PC devices, the FPA incorporates extensive shielding and lead routing in the multilayer carriers and flex cables, as well as features in the ROIC design. The 526 lines necessary to operate the FPA are led out of the vacuum dewar, which is cooled via the spectrometer. The focal plane is cooled to 58 K through a sapphire rod interfaced to a pulse tube cooler. The Engineering Model (EM) and Protoflight Model (PFM) detector/dewar assemblies have been fabricated, assembled, tested, and delivered for system integration, and the EM instrument has been assembled and tested. The key design features of the FPA and dewar assembly have been presented in previous SPIE symposiums and will be briefly reviewed. In this paper the emphasis will be on performance results such as sensitivity, linearity, assembly tolerances, environmental test results, and other parameters of interest, as well as a detailed review of the actual flight hardware assembly.

The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) is a high resolution IR spectrometer (lambda/Delta lambda congruent to 1200) which will map global temperatures and identify atmospheric aerosols from orbit by monitoring key atmospheric absorption lines. The focal plane consists of ten bilinear photovoltaic (PV) and two photoconductive (PC) HgCdTe detector arrays (modules) sampling a 3.7 to 15.4 mu m spectral window in 15 bands. To attain the desired temperature accuracy, tight constraints on focal plane performance parameters such as linearity better than 0.1%, quantum efficiency (QE) on the order of 70%, low noise or noise equivalent quantum flux density (NEQFD), and no outages at key spectral lines have been imposed. Assessment of focal plane performance begins at the detector and readout levels where flight candidate detector arrays and CMOS readouts are selected. PV detector arrays and their readouts are hybridized (PC modules are wire-bonded directly) into modules which are then individually tested under simulated flight conditions. Five of the twelve module types are incorporated into an engineering-level (EM) focal plane upon which the module level tests are repeated as a prelude to the fabrication and testing of a separate, fully populated, flight-level (PFM) focal plane. Module testing has demonstrated that many difficult system requirements have been met, and work continues to optimize module performance. Lockheed Martin IR Imaging Systems'(LMIRIS) overall design of the infrared (IR) Detector/Dewar assembly and focal plane development program is given, followed by a summary of PV and PC module data.